The Gulag Archipelago Volume I

THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO ~—

Also by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

The Nobel Lecture on Literature

August 1914

A Lenten Letter to Pimen, Patriarch of All Russia
Stories and Prose Poems

The Love Girl and the Innocent

The Cancer Ward

The First Circle

For the Good of the Cause

We Never Make Mistakes

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

THE GULAG
ARCHIPELAGO

1918 — 1956

An Experiment in Literary Investigation
I-II

Translated from the Russian by Thomas P. Whitney

HARPER & ROW, PUBLISHERS

New York, Evanston, San Francisco, London

rd

Ee
1817

I dedicate this
to all those who did not live
to tell it.
And may they please forgive me
for not having seen it all
nor remembered it all,
for not having divined all of it.

Author's Note

For years I have with reluctant heart withheld from publication
this already completed book: my obligation to those still living
outweighed my obligation to the dead. But now that State Se-
curity has seized the book anyway, I have no alternative but to
publish it immediately.

In this book there are no fictitious persons, nor fictitious events.
People and places are named with their own names. If they are
identified by initials instead of names, it is for personal considera-
tions. If they are not named at all, it is only because human
memory has failed to preserve their names. But it all took place
just as it is here described.

Contents

PART I

—
N

PART II

l.

— j
m. ODVEO N DNA WN EE

Preface

The Prison Industry

. Arrest

. The History of Our Sewage Disposal System
. The Interrogation

. The Bluecaps

. First Cell, First Love

. That Spring

In the Engine Room

. The Law asa Child

. The Law Becomes a Man
. The Law Matures

. The Supreme Measure

. Tyurzak

Perpetual Motion

The Ships of the Archipelago

489

vii

viii | CONTENTS

2. The Ports of the Archipelago
3. The Slave Caravans
4. From Island to Island

Translators Notes
Glossary:

Names
Institutions and Terms
Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

page 2 Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
In the army
In detention
After his release from camp

page 488 Viktor Petrovich Pokrovsky
Aleksandr Shtrobinder
Vasily Ivanovich Anichkov
Aleksandr Andreyevich Svechin
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Reformatsky
Yelizaveta Yevgenyevna Anichkova

533
565
588

616

621
637
642

Preface

In 1949 some friends and I came upon a noteworthy news
item in Nature, a magazine of the Academy of Sciences. It re-
ported in tiny type that in the course of excavations on the
Kolyma River a subterranean ice lens had been discovered which
was actually a frozen stream—and in it were found frozen speci-
mens of prehistoric fauna some tens of thousands of years old.
Whether fish or salamander, these were preserved in so fresh a
state, the scientific correspondent reported, that those present
immediately broke open the ice encasing the specimens and de-
voured them with relish on the spot.

The magazine no doubt astonished its small audience with the
news of how successfully the flesh of fish could be kept fresh in
a frozen state. But few, indeed, among its readers were able to
decipher the genuine and heroic meaning of this incautious report.

As for us, however—we understood instantly. We could picture
the entire scene right down to the smallest details: how those
present broke up the ice in frenzied haste; how, flouting the
higher claims of ichthyology and elbowing each other to be first,
they tore off chunks of the prehistoric flesh and hauled them over
to the bonfire to thaw them out and bolt them down.

We understood because we ourselves were the same kind of
people as those present at that event. We, too, were from that
powerful tribe of zeks, unique on the face of the earth, the only
people who could devour prehistoric salamander with relish.

And the Kolyma was the greatest and most famous island, the

ix

X | PREFACE

pole of ferocity of that amazing country of Gulag which, though
scattered in an Archipelago geographically, was, in the psycho-
logical sense, fused into a continent—an almost invisible, almost
imperceptible country inhabited by the zek people.

And this Archipelago crisscrossed and patterned that other
country within which it was located, like a gigantic patchwork,
cutting into its cities, hovering over its streets. Yet there were
many who did not even guess at its presence and many, many
others who had heard something vague. And only those who had
been there knew the whole truth.

But, as though stricken dumb on the islands of the Archipelago,
they kept their silence.

By an unexpected turn of our history, a bit of the truth, an
insignificant part of the whole, was allowed out in the open. But
those same hands which once screwed tight our handcuffs now
hold out their palms in reconciliation: “No, don’t! Don’t dig up
the past! Dwell on the past and you'll lose an eye.”

But the proverb goes on to say: “Forget the past and you'll
lose both eyes.”

Decades go by, and the scars and sores of the past are healing
over for good. In the course of this period some of the islands
of the Archipelago have shuddered and dissolved and the polar
sea of oblivion rolls over them. And someday in the future, this
Archipelago, its air, and the bones of its inhabitants, frozen in
a lens of ice, will be discovered by our descendants like some im-
probable salamander.

I would not be so bold as to try to write the history of the
Archipelago. I have never had the chance to read the documents.
And, in fact, will anyone ever have the chance to read them?
Those who do not wish to recall have already had enough time—
and will have more—to destroy all the documents, down to the
very last one. ©

I have absorbed into myself my own eleven years there not as
something shameful nor as a nightmare to be cursed: I have come
almost to love that monstrous world, and now, by a happy turn
of events, I have also been entrusted with many recent reports
and letters. So perhaps I shall be able to give some account of
the bones and flesh of that salamander—which, incidentally, is
still alive.

Preface | xi

This book could never have been created by one person alone.
In addition to what I myself was able to take away from the
Archipelago—on the skin of my back, and with my eyes and ears
—material for this book was given me in reports, memoirs, and
letters by 227 witnesses, whose names were to have been listed
here.

What I here express to them is not personal gratitude, because
this is our common, collective monument to all those who were
tortured and murdered.

From among them I would like to single out in particular those
who worked hard to help me obtain supporting bibliographical
material from books to be found in contemporary libraries or
from books long since removed from libraries and destroyed;
great persistence was often required to find even one copy which
had been preserved. Even more would I like to pay tribute to
those who helped me keep this manuscript concealed in difficult
periods and then to have it copied.

But the time has not yet come when I dare name them.

The old Solovetsky Islands prisoner Dmitri Petrovich Vitkov-
sky was to have been editor of this book. But his half a lifetime
spent there—indeed, his own camp memoirs are entitled “Half
a Lifetime”—resulted in untimely paralysis, and it was not until
after he had already been deprived of the gift of speech that he
was able to read several completed chapters only and see for
himself that everything will be told.

xii | PREFACE

And if freedom still does not dawn on my country for a long
time to come, then the very reading and handing on of this book
will be very dangerous, so that I am bound to salute future readers
as well—on behalf of those who have perished.

When I began to write this book in 1958, I knew of no memoirs
nor works of literature dealing with the camps. During my years
of work before 1967 I gradually became acquainted with the
Kolyma Stories of Varlam Shalamov and the memoirs of Dmitri
Vitkovsky, Y. Ginzburg, and O. Adamova-Sliozberg, to which
I refer in the course of my narrative as literary facts known to
all (as indeed they someday shall be).

Despite their intent and against their will, certain persons pro-
vided invaluable material for this book and helped preserve many
important facts and statistics as well as the very air they breathed:
M. I. Sudrabs-Latsis, N. V. Krylenko, the Chief State Prosecutor
for many years, his heir A. Y. Vyshinsky, and those jurists who
were his accomplices, among whom one must single out in par-
ticular I. L. Averbakh.

Material for this book was also provided by thirty-six Soviet
writers, headed by Maxim Gorky, authors of the disgraceful book
on the White Sea Canal, which was the first in Russian literature
to glorify slave labor.

PART |

The Prison Industry

“In the period of dictatorship, surrounded on all sides by
enemies, we sometimes manifested unnecessary leniency
and unnecessary softheartedness.”

KRYLENKO,
speech at the Promparty trial

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn—in the army

... in detention ... after his release from camp

Chapter 1

Arrest

How do people get to this clandestine Archipelago? Hour by
hour planes fly there, ships steer their course there, and trains
thunder off to it—but all with nary a mark on them to tell of their
destination. And at ticket windows or at travel bureaus for Soviet
or foreign tourists the employees would be astounded if you were
to ask for a ticket to go there. They know nothing and they've
never heard of the Archipelago as a whole or of any one of its
innumerable islands.

Those who go to the Archipelago to administer it get there via
the training schools of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Those who go there to be guards are conscripted via the military
conscription centers.

And those who, like you and me, dear reader, go there to die,
must get there solely and compulsorily via arrest.

Arrest! Need it be said that it is a breaking point in your life,
a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you? That
it is an unassimilable spiritual earthquake not every person can
cope with, as a result of which people often slip into insanity?

The Universe has as many different centers as there are living
beings in it. Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that
Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: “You are under
arrest.”

If you are arrested, can anything else remain unshattered by
this cataclysm?

But the darkened mind is incapable of embracing these dis-
placements in our universe, and both the most sophisticated and

3

4 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

the veriest simpleton among us, drawing on all life’s experience,
can gasp out only: “Me? What for?”

And this is a question which, though repeated millions and
millions of times before, has yet to receive an answer.

Arrest is an instantaneous, shattering thrust, expulsion. somer-
sault from one state into another.

We have been happily borne—or perhaps have unhappily
dragged our weary way—down the long and crooked streets of
our lives, past all kinds of walls and fences made of rotting wood,
rammed earth, brick, concrete, iron railings. We have never given
a thought to what lies behind them. We have never tried to pene-
trate them with our vision or our understanding. But there is
where the Gulag country begins, right next to us, two yards away
from us. In addition, we have failed to notice an enormous num-
ber of closely fitted, well-disguised doors and gates in these
fences. All those gates were prepared for us, every last one! And
all of a sudden the fateful gate swings quickly open, and four
white male hands, unaccustomed to physical labor but none-
theless strong and tenacious, grab us by the leg, arm, collar, cap,
ear, and drag us in like a sack, and the gate behind us, the gate to
our past life, is slammed shut once and for all.

That’s all there is to it! You are arrested!

And you'll find nothing better to respond with than a lamblike
bleat: “Me? What for?”

That’s what arrest is: it’s a blinding flash and a blow which
shifts the present instantly into the past and the impossible into
omnipotent actuality.

That’s all. And neither for the first hour nor for the first day
will you be able to grasp anything else.

Except that in your desperation the fake circus moon will blink
at you: “It’s a mistake! They'll set things right!”

And everything which is by now comprised in the traditional,
even literary, image of an arrest will pile up and take shape, not
in your own disordered memory, but in what your family and
your neighbors in your apartment remember: The sharp night-
time ring or the rude knock at the door. The insolent entrance
of the unwiped jackboots of the unsleeping State Security oper-
atives. The frightened and cowed civilian witness at their backs.
(And what function does this civilian witness serve? The victim
doesn’t even dare think about it and the operatives don’t remem-

Arrest | 5

ber, but that’s what the regulations call for, and so he has to sit
there all night long and sign in the morning.’ For the witness,
jerked from his bed, it is torture too—to go out night after night
to help arrest his own neighbors and acquaintances. )

The traditional image of arrest is also trembling hands packing
for the victim—a change of underwear, a piece of soap, some-
thing to eat; and no one knows what is needed, what is permitted,
what clothes are best to wear; and the Security agents keep in-
terrupting and hurrying you:

“You don’t need anything. They'll feed you there. Its warm
there.” (It’s all lies. They keep hurrying you to frighten you.)

The traditional image of arrest is also what happens afterward,
when the poor victim has been taken away. It is an alien, brutal,
and crushing force totally dominating the apartment for hours on
end, a breaking, ripping open, pulling from the walls, emptying
things from wardrobes and desks onto the floor, shaking, dumping
out, and ripping apart—piling up mountains of litter on the floor
—and the crunch of things being trampled beneath jackboots.
And nothing is sacred in a search! During the arrest of the loco-
motive engineer Inoshin, a tiny coffin stood in his room containing
the body of his newly dead child. The “jurists” dumped the child’s
body out of the coffin and searched it. They shake sick people out
of their sickbeds, and they unwind bandages to search beneath
them.? |

Nothing is so stupid as to be inadmissible during a search!
For example, they seized from the antiquarian Chetverukhin “a
certain number of pages of Tsarist decrees’—to wit, the decree
on ending the war with Napoleon, on the formation of the Holy
Alliance, and a proclamation of public prayers against cholera
during the epidemic of 1830. From our greatest expert on Tibet,
Vostrikov, they confiscated ancient Tibetan manuscripts of great
value; and it took the pupils of the deceased scholar thirty years
to wrest them from the KGB! When the Orientalist Nevsky was

1. The regulation, purposeless in itself, derives, N.M. recalls, from that
strange time when the citizenry not only was supposed to but actually dared to
verify the actions of the police.

2. When in 1937 they wiped out Dr. Kazakov’s institute, the “commission”
broke up the jars containing the lysates developed by him, even though patients
who had been cured and others still being treated rushed around them, begging
them to preserve the miraculous medicines. (According to the official version,
the lysates were supposed to be poisons; in that case, why should they not have
been kept as material evidence?)

6 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

arrested, they grabbed Tangut manuscripts—and twenty-five
years later the deceased victim was posthumously awarded a
Lenin Prize for deciphering them. From Karger they took his
archive of the Yenisei Ostyaks and vetoed the alphabet and
vocabulary he had developed for this people—and a small na-
tionality was thereby left without any written language. It would
take a long time to describe all this in educated speech, but there’s
a folk saying about the search which covers the subject: They are
looking for something which was never put there. They carry off
whatever they have seized, but sometimes they compel the
arrested individual to carry it. Thus Nina Aleksandrovna Pal-
chinskaya hauled over her shoulder a bag filled with the papers
and letters of her eternally busy and active husband, the late
great Russian engineer, carrying it into their maw—once and
for all, forever. l

For those left behind after the arrest there is the long tail end
of a wrecked and devastated life. And the attempts to go and
deliver food parcels. But from all the windows the answer comes
in barking voices: “Nobody here by that name!” “Never heard
of him!” Yes, and in the worst days in Leningrad it took five
days of standing in crowded lines just to get to that window. And
it may be only after half a year or a year that the arrested person
responds at all. Or else the answer is tossed out: “Deprived of the
right to correspond.” And that means once and for all. “No right
to correspondence”—and that almost for certain means: “Has
been shot.”?

That’s how we picture arrest to ourselves.

The kind of night arrest described is, in fact, a favorite, be-
cause it has important advantages. Everyone living in the apart-
ment is thrown into a state of terror by the first knock at the door.
The arrested person is torn from the warmth of his bed. He is in
a daze, half-asleep, helpless, and his judgment is befogged. In a
night arrest the State Security men have a superiority in numbers;
there are many of them, armed, against one person who hasn’t

3. In other words, “We live in the cursed conditions in which a human
being can disappear into the void and even his closest relatives, his mother and
his wife .. . do not know for years what has become of him.” Is that right
or not? That is what Lenin wrote in 1910 in his obituary of Babushkin. But
let’s speak frankly: Babushkin was transporting arms for an uprising, and was
caught with them when he was shot. He knew what he was doing. You couldn’t
say that about helpless rabbits like us.

Arrest | 7

even finished buttoning his trousers. During the arrest and search
it is highly improbable that a crowd of potential supporters will
gather at the entrance. The unhurried, step-by-step visits, first to
one apartment, then to another, tomorrow to a third and a fourth,
provide an opportunity for the Security operations personnel to
be deployed with the maximum efficiency and to imprison
many more citizens of a given town than the police force itself
numbers.

In addition, there’s an advantage to night arrests in that neither
the people in neighboring apartment houses nor those on the city
streets can see how many have been taken away. Arrests which
frighten the closest neighbors are no event at all to those farther
away. It’s as if they had not taken place. Along that same asphalt
ribbon on which the Black Marias scurry at night, a tribe of
youngsters strides by day with banners, flowers, and gay, un-
troubled songs.

But those who take, whose work consists solely of arrests, for
whom the horror is boringly repetitive, have a much broader un-
derstanding of how arrests operate. They operate according to a
large body of theory, and innocence must not lead one to ignore
this. The science of arrest is an important segment of the course
on general penology and has been propped up with a substantial
body of social theory. Arrests are classified according to various
criteria: nighttime and daytime; at home, at work, during a
journey; first-time arrests and repeats; individual and group
arrests. Arrests are distinguished by the degree of surprise
required, the amount of resistance expected (even though in tens
of millions of cases no resistance was expected and in fact there
was none). Arrests are also differentiated by the thoroughness of
the required search;* by instructions either to make out or not to

4. And there is a separate Science of Searches too. I have had the chance
to read a pamphlet on this subject for correspondence-school law students in
Alma-Ata. Its author praises highly those police officials who in the course of
their searches went so far as to turn over two tons of manure, eight cubic
yards of firewood, or two loads of hay; cleaned the snow from an entire
collective-farm vegetable plot, dismantled brick ovens, dug up cesspools,
checked out toilet bowls, looked into doghouses, chicken coops, birdhouses,
tore apart mattresses, ripped adhesive tape off people’s bodies and even tore
out metal teeth in the search for microfilm. Students were advised to begin
and to end with a body search (during the course of the search the arrested
person might have grabbed up something that had already been examined).
They were also advised to return to the site of a search at a different time of
day and carry out the search all over again.

8 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

make out an inventory of confiscated property or seal a room or
apartment; to arrest the wife after the husband and send the
children to an orphanage, or to send the rest of the family into
exile, or to send the old folks to a labor camp too.

No, no: arrests vary widely in form. In 1926 Irma Mendel, a
Hungarian, obtained through the Comintern two front-row
tickets to the Bolshoi Theatre. Interrogator Klegel was courting
her at the time and she invited him to go with her. They sat
through the show very affectionately, and when it was over he
took her—straight to the Lubyanka. And if on a flowering June
day in 1927 on Kuznetsky Most, the plump-cheeked, redheaded
beauty Anna Skripnikova, who had just bought some navy-blue
material for a dress, climbed into a hansom cab with a young
man-about-town, you can be sure it wasn’t a lovers’ tryst at all, as
the cabman understood very well and showed by his frown (he
knew the Organs don’t pay). It was an arrest. In just a moment
they would turn on the Lubyanka and enter the black maw of the
gates. And if, some twenty-two springs later, Navy Captain
Second Rank Boris Burkovsky, wearing a white tunic and a trace
of expensive eau de cologne, was buying a cake for a young lady,
do not take an oath that the cake would ever reach the young
lady and not be sliced up instead by the knives of the men search-
ing the captain and then delivered to him in his first cell. No, one
certainly cannot say that daylight arrest, arrest during a journey,
or arrest in the middle of a crowd has ever been neglected in our
country. However, it has always been clean-cut—and, most sur-
prising of all, the victims, in cooperation with the Security men,
have conducted themselves in the noblest conceivable manner, so
as to spare the living from witnessing the death of the condemned.

Not everyone can be arrested at home, with a preliminary
knock at the door (and if there is a knock, then it has to be the
house manager or else the postman). And not everyone can be
arrested at work either. If the person to be arrested is vicious,
then it’s better to seize him outside his ordinary milieu—away
from his family and colleagues, from those who share his views,
from any hiding places. It is essential that he have no chance to
destroy, hide, or pass on anything to anyone. VIP’s in the military
or the Party were sometimes first given-new assignments, en-
sconced in a private railway car, and then arrested en route. Some

Arrest | 9

obscure, ordinary mortal, scared to death by epidemic arrests all
around him and already depressed for a week by sinister glances
from his chief, is suddenly summoned to the local Party com-
mittee, where he is beamingly presented with a vacation ticket to
a Sochi sanatorium. The rabbit is overwhelmed and immediately
concludes that his fears were groundless. After expressing his
gratitude, he hurries home, triumphant, to pack his suitcase. It
is only two hours till train time, and he scolds his wife for being
too slow. He arrives at the station with time to spare. And there
in the waiting room or at the bar he is hailed by an extraordinar-
ily pleasant young man: “Don’t you remember me, Pyotr
Ivanich?” Pyotr Ivanich has difficulty remembering: “Well, not
exactly, you see, although . . .” The young man, however, is over-
flowing with friendly concern: “Come now, how can that be? PI
have to remind you. . . .” And he bows respectfully to Pyotr
Ivanich’s wife: “You must forgive us. I'll keep him only one
minute.” The wife accedes, and trustingly the husband lets him-
self be led away by the arm—forever or for ten years!

The station is thronged—and no one notices anything... .
Oh, you citizens who love to travel! Do not forget that in every
station there are a GPU Branch and several prison cells.

This importunity of alleged acquaintances is so abrupt that
only a person who has not had the wolfish preparation of camp
life is likely to pull back from it. Do not suppose, for example,
that if you are an employee of the American Embassy by the
name of Alexander D. you cannot be arrested in broad daylight
on Gorky Street, right by the Central Telegraph Office. Your un-
familiar friend dashes through the press of the crowd, and opens
his plundering arms to embrace you: “Saaasha!” He simply
shouts at you, with no effort to be inconspicuous. “Hey, pal! Long
time no see! Come on over, let’s get out of the way.” At that
moment a Pobeda sedan draws up to the curb. . . . And several
days later TASS will issue an angry statement to all the papers
alleging that informed circles of the Soviet government have no
information on the disappearance of Alexander D. But what’s so
unusual about that? Our boys have carried out such arrests in
Brussels—which was where Zhora Blednov was seized—not just
in Moscow.

One has to give the Organs their due: in an age when public

10 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

speeches, the plays in our theaters, and women’s fashions all
seem to have come off assembly lines, arrests can be of the most
varied kind. They take you aside in a factory corridor after you
have had your pass checked—and you're arrested. They take you
from a military hospital with a temperature of 102, as they did
with Ans Bernshtein, and the doctor will not raise a peep about
your arrest—just let him try! They'll take you right off the operat-
ing table—as they took N. M. Vorobyev, a school inspector, in
1936, in the middle of an operation for stomach ulcer—and drag
you off to a cell, as they did him, half-alive and all bloody (as
Karpunich recollects). Or, like Nadya Levitskaya, you try to get
information about your mother’s sentence, and they give it to
you, but it turns out to be a confrontation—and your own arrest!
In the Gastronome—the fancy food store—you are invited to the
special-order department and arrested there. You are arrested by
a religious pilgrim whom you have put up for the night “for the
sake of Christ.” You are arrested by a meterman who has come
to read your electric meter. You are arrested by a bicyclist who
has run into you on the street, by a railway conductor, a taxi
driver, a savings bank teller, the manager of a movie theater. Any
one of them can arrest you, and you notice the concealed maroon-
colored identification card only when it is too late.

Sometimes arrests even seem to be a game—there is so much
superfluous imagination, so much well-fed energy, invested in
them. After all, the victim would not resist anyway. Is it that the
Security agents want to justify their employment and their num-
bers? After all, it would seem enough to send notices to all the
rabbits marked for arrest, and they would show up obediently at
the designated hour and minute at the iron gates of State Security
with a bundle in their hands—tready to occupy a piece of floor in
the cell for which they were intended. And, in fact, that’s the way
collective farmers are arrested. Who wants to go all the way to
a hut at night, with no roads to travel on? They are summoned to
the village soviet—and arrested there. Manual workers are called
into the office.

Of course, every machine has a point at which it is overloaded,
beyond which it cannot function. In the strained and overloaded
years of 1945 and 1946, when trainload after trainload poured
in from Europe, to be swallowed up immediately and sent off to

Arrest | 11

Gulag, all that excessive theatricality went out the window, and
the whole theory suffered greatly. All the fuss and feathers of
ritual went flying in every direction, and the arrest of tens of
thousands took on the appearance of a squalid roll call: they
stood there with lists, read off the names of those on one train,
loaded them onto another, and that was the whole arrest.

For several decades political arrests were distinguished in our
country precisely by the fact that people were arrested who were
guilty of nothing and were therefore unprepared to put up any
resistance whatsoever. There was a general feeling of being
destined for destruction, a sense of having nowhere to escape
from the GPU-NKVD (which, incidentally, given our internal
passport system, was quite accurate). And even in the fever of
epidemic arrests, when people leaving for work said farewell to
their families every day, because they could not be certain they
would return at night, even then almost no one tried to run away
and only in rare cases did people commit suicide. And that was
exactly what was required. A submissive sheep is a find for a wolf.

This submissiveness was also due to ignorance of the mech- `
anics of epidemic arrests. By and large, the Organs had no pro-
found reasons for their choice of whom to arrest and whom not
to arrest. They merely had over-all assignments, quotas for a
specific number of arrests. These quotas might be filled on an
orderly basis or wholly arbitrarily. In 1937 a woman came to
the reception room of the Novocherkassk NKVD to ask what
she should do about the unfed unweaned infant of a neighbor who
had been arrested. They said: “Sit down, we'll find out.” She sat
there for two hours—whereupon they took her and tossed her
into a cell. They had a total plan which had to be fulfilled in a
hurry, and there was no one available to send out into the city
—and here was this woman already in their hands!

On the other hand, the NKVD did come to get the Latvian
Andrei Pavel near Orsha. But he didn’t open the door; he jumped
out the window, escaped, and shot straight to Siberia. And even
though he lived under his own name, and it was clear from his
documents that he had come from Orsha, he was never arrested,
nor summoned to the Organs, nor subjected to any suspicion
whatsoever. After all, search for wanted persons falls into three
categories: All-Union, republican, and provincial. And the pur-

12 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

suit of nearly half of those arrested in those epidemics would have
been confined to the provinces. A person marked for arrest by
virtue of chance circumstances, such as a neighbor’s denuncia-
tion, could be easily replaced by another neighbor. Others, like
Andrei Pavel, who found themselves in a trap or an ambushed
apartment by accident, and who were bold enough to escape im-
mediately, before they could be questioned, were never caught
and never charged; while those who stayed behind to await justice
got a term in prison. And the overwhelming majority—almost
all—behaved just like that: without any spirit, helplessly, with a
sense of doom.

It is true, of course, that the NKVD, in the absence of the
person it wanted, would make his relatives guarantee not to leave
the area. And, of course, it was easy enough to cook up a case
against those who stayed behind to replace the one who had fled.

Universal innocence also gave rise to the universal failure to
act. Maybe they won’t take you? Maybe it will all blow over? A.
I. Ladyzhensky was the chief teacher in a school in remote Kolo-
griv. In 1937 a peasant approached him in an open market and
passed him a message from a third person: “Aleksandr Ivanich,
get out of town, you are on the list!” But he stayed: After all, the
whole school rests on my shoulders, and their own children are
pupils here. How can they arrest me? (Several days later he was
arrested.) Not everyone was so fortunate as to understand at the
age of fourteen, as did Vanya Levitsky: “Every honest man is
sure to go to prison. Right now my papa is serving time, and
when I grow up they'll put me in too.” (They put him in when he
was twenty-three years old.) The majority sit quietly and dare to
hope. Since you aren’t guilty, then how can they arrest you?
It’s a mistake! They are already dragging you along by the collar,
and you still keep on exclaiming to yourself: “It’s a mistake!
They'll set things straight and let me out!” Others are being
arrested en masse, and that’s a bothersome fact, but in those other
cases there is always some dark area: “Maybe he was guilty... ?”
But as for you, you are obviously innocent! You still believe that
the Organs are humanly logical institutions: they will set things
straight and let you out.

Why, then, should you run away? And how can you resist
right then? After all, you’ll only make your situation worse; you'll

Arrest | 13

make it more difficult for them to sort out the mistake. And it
isn’t just that you don’t put up any resistance; you even walk
down the stairs on tiptoe, as you are ordered to do, so your
neighbors won’t hear."

At what exact point, then, should one resist? When one’s belt
is taken away? When one is ordered to face into a corner? When
one crosses the threshold of one’s home? An arrest consists of a
series of incidental irrelevancies, of a multitude of things that do
not matter, and there seems no point in arguing about any one of
them individually—especially at a time when the thoughts of the
person arrested are wrapped tightly about the big question: “What
for?”—and yet all these incidental irrelevancies taken together
implacably constitute the arrest.

Almost anything can occupy the thoughts of a person who has
just been arrested! This alone would fill volumes. There can be
feelings which we never suspected. When nineteen-year-old

5. And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things
have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make
an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say
good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example
in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not
simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the down-
stairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had
nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of
half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?
After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for
no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be
cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out
there on the street with one lonely chauffeur—what if it had been driven off
or its tires spiked? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of
officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed
machine would have ground to a halt!

If... if... We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more—we had no
awareness of the real situation. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst
in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure! (Arthur
Ransome describes a workers’ meeting in Yaroslavl in 1921. Delegates were
sent to the workers from the Central Committee in Moscow to confer on the
substance of the argument about trade unions. The representative of the oppo-
sition, Y. Larin, explained to the workers that their trade union must be their
defense against the administration, that they possessed rights which they had
won and upon which no one else had any right to infringe. The workers, how-
ever, were completely indifferent, simply not comprehending whom they still
needed to be defended against and why they still needed any rights. When the
spokesman for the Party line rebuked them for their laziness and for getting
out of hand, and demanded sacrifices from them—overtime work without pay,
reductions in food, military discipline in the factory administration—this
aroused great elation and applause.) We purely and simply deserved everything
that happened afterward.

14 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

Yevgeniya Doyarenko was arrested in 1921 and three young
Chekists were poking about her bed and through the underwear
in her chest of drawers, she was not disturbed. There was nothing
there, and they would find nothing. But all of a sudden they
touched her personal diary, which she would not have shown even
to her own mother. And these hostile young strangers reading the
words she had written was more devastating to her than the whole
Lubyanka with its bars and its cellars. It is true of many that the
outrage inflicted by arrest on their personal feelings and attach-
ments can be far, far stronger than their political beliefs or their
fear of prison. A person who is not inwardly prepared for the
use of violence against him is aways weaker than the person
committing the violence.

There are a few bright and daring individuals who understand
instantly. Grigoryev, the Director of the Geological Institute of
the Academy of Sciences, barricaded himself inside and spent two
hours burning up his papers when they came to arrest him in
1948.

Sometimes the principal emotion of the person arrested is relief
and even happiness! This is another aspect of human nature. It
happened before the Revolution too: the Yekaterinodar school-
teacher Serdyukova, involved in the case of Aleksandr Ulyanov,
felt only relief when she was arrested. But this feeling was a
thousand times stronger during epidemics of arrests when all
around you they were hauling in people like yourself and still had
not come for you; for some reason they were taking their time.
After all, that kind of exhaustion, that kind of suffering, is worse
than any kind of arrest, and not only for a person of limited cour-
age. Vasily Vlasov, a fearless Communist, whom we shall recall
more than once later on, renounced the idea of escape proposed
by his non-Party assistants, and pined away because the entire
leadership of the Kady District was arrested in 1937, and they
kept delaying and delaying his own arrest. He could only endure
the blow head on. He did endure it, and then he relaxed, and
during the first days after his arrest he felt marvelous. In 1934
the priest Father Irakly went to Alma-Ata to visit some believers
in exile there. During his absence they came three times to his
Moscow apartment to arrest him. When he returned, members
of his flock met him at the station and refused to let him go home,

Arrest | 15

and for eight years hid him in one apartment after another. The
priest suffered so painfully from this harried life that when he was
finally arrested in 1942 he sang hymns of praise to God.

In this chapter we are speaking only of the masses, the helpless
rabbits arrested for no one knows what reason. But in this book
we will also have to touch on those who in postrevolutionary times
remained genuinely political. Vera Rybakova, a Social Demo-
cratic student, dreamed when she was in freedom of being in the
detention center in Suzdal. Only there did she hope to encounter
her old comrades—for there were none of them left in freedom.
And only there could she work out her world outlook. The Socialist
Revolutionary—the SR—Yekaterina Olitskaya didn’t consider
herself worthy of being imprisoned in 1924. After all, Russia’s
best people had served time and she was still young and had not
yet done anything for Russia. But freedom itself was expelling
her. And so both of them went to prison—with pride and hap-
piness.

“Resistance! Why didn’t you resist?” Today those who have
continued to live on in comfort scold those who suffered.

Yes, resistance should have begun right there, at the moment
of the arrest itself.

But it did not begin.

And so they are leading you. During a daylight arrest there is
always that brief and unique moment when they are leading you,
either inconspicuously, on the basis of a cowardly deal you have
made, or else quite openly, their pistols unholstered, through a
crowd of hundreds of just such doomed innocents as yourself.
You aren’t gagged. You really can and you really ought to cry
out—to cry out that you are being arrested! That villains in dis-
guise are trapping people! That arrests are being made on the
strength of false denunciations! That millions are being subjected
to silent reprisals! If many such outcries had been heard all over
the city in the course of a day, would not our fellow citizens
perhaps have begun to bristle? And would arrests perhaps no
longer have been so easy?

In 1927, when submissiveness had not yet softened our brains
to such a degree, two Chekists tried to arrest a woman on Serpu-
khov Square during the day. She grabbed hold of the stanchion of

16 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

a streetlamp and began to scream, refusing to submit. A crowd
gathered. (There had to have been that kind of woman; there had
to have been that kind of crowd too! Passers-by didn’t all just
close their eyes and hurry by!) The quick young men immediately
became flustered. They can’t work in the public eye. They got
into their car and fled. (Right then and there she should have
gone to a railroad station and left! But she went home to spend
the night. And during the night they took her off to the Lub-
yanka. )

Instead, not one sound comes from your parched lips, and
that passing crowd naively believes that you and your execu-
tioners are friends out for a stroll.

I myself often had the chance to cry out.

On the eleventh day after my arrest, three SMERSH bums,
more burdened by four suitcases full of war booty than by me
(they had come to rely on me in the course of the long trip),
brought me to the Byelorussian Station in Moscow. They were
called a Special Convoy—in other words, a special escort guard
—but in actual fact their automatic pistols only interfered with
their dragging along the four terribly heavy bags of loot they
and their chiefs in SMERSH counterintelligence on the Second
Byelorussian Front had plundered in Germany and were now
bringing to their families in the Fatherland under the pretext of
convoying me. I myself lugged a fifth suitcase with no great joy
since it contained my diaries and literary works, which were
being used as evidence against me.

Not one of the three knew the city, and it was up to me to pick
the shortest route to the prison. I had personally to conduct them
to the Lubyanka, where they had never been before (and which,
in fact, I confused with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs).

I had spent one day in the counterintelligence prison at army
headquarters and three days in the counterintelligence prison at
the headquarters of the front, where my cellmates had educated
me in the deceptions practiced by the interrogators, their threats
and beatings; in the fact that once a person was arrested he was
never released; and in the inevitability of a tenner, a ten-year
sentence; and then by a miracle I had suddenly burst out of there
and for four days had traveled like a free person among free
people, even though my flanks had already lain on rotten straw

Arrest | 17

beside the latrine bucket, my eyes had already beheld beaten-up
and sleepless men, my ears had heard the truth, and my mouth
had tasted prison gruel. So why did I keep silent? Why, in my
last minute out in the open, did I not attempt to enlighten the
hoodwinked crowd?

I kept silent, too, in the Polish city of Brodnica—but maybe
they didn’t understand Russian there. I didn’t call out one word
on the streets of Bialystok—but maybe it wasn’t a matter that
concerned the Poles. I didn’t utter a sound at the Volkovysk Sta-
tion—but there were very few people there. I walked along the
Minsk Station platform beside those same bandits as if nothing
at all were amiss—but the station was still a ruin. And now I
was leading the SMERSH men through the circular upper con-
course of the Byelorussian-Radial subway station on the Moscow
circle line, with its white-ceilinged dome and brilliant electric
lights, and opposite us two parallel escalators, thickly packed
with Muscovites, rising from below. It seemed as though they
were all looking at me! They kept coming in an endless ribbon
from down there, from the depths of ignorance—on and on
beneath the gleaming dome, reaching toward me for at least one
word of truth—so why did I keep silent?

Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why
he is right not to sacrifice himself.

Some still have hopes of a favorable outcome to their case and
are afraid to ruin their chances by an outcry. (For, after all, we
get no news from that other world, and we do not realize that
from the very moment of arrest our fate has almost certainly
been decided in the worst possible sense and that we cannot
make it any worse.) Others have not yet attained the mature con-
cepts on which a shout of protest to the crowd must be based.
Indeed, only a revolutionary has slogans on his lips that are
crying to be uttered aloud; and where would the uninvolved,
peaceable average man come by such slogans? He simply does
not know what to shout. And then, last of all, there is the person
whose heart is too full of emotion, whose eyes have seen too
much, for that whole ocean to pour forth in a few disconnected
cries. |

As for me, I kept silent for one further reason: because those
Muscovites thronging the steps of the escalators were too few for

18 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

me, too few! Here my cry would be heard by 200 or twice 200,
but what about the 200 million? Vaguely, unclearly, I had a
vision that someday I would cry out to the 200 million.
But for the time being I did not open my mouth, and the
escalator dragged me implacably down into the nether world.
And when I got to Okhotny Ryad, I continued to keep silent.
Nor did I utter a cry at the Metropole Hotel.
Nor wave my arms on the Golgotha of Lubyanka Square.

Mine was, probably, the easiest imaginable kind of arrest. It did
not tear me from the embrace of kith and kin, nor wrench me
from a deeply cherished home life. One pallid European February
it took me from our narrow salient on the Baltic Sea, where, de-
pending on one’s point of view, either we had surrounded the
Germans or they had surrounded us, and it deprived me only of
my familiar artillery battery and the scenes of the last three
months of the war.

The brigade commander called me to his headquarters and
asked me for my pistol; I turned it over without suspecting any
evil intent, when suddenly, from a tense, immobile suite of staff
officers in the corner, two counterintelligence officers stepped for-
ward hurriedly, crossed the room in a few quick bounds, their
four hands grabbed simultaneously at the star on my cap, my
shoulder boards, my officer’s belt, my map case, and they shouted
theatrically:

“You are under arrest!”

Burning and prickling from head to toe, all I could exclaim
was:

“Me? What for?”

And even though there is usually no answer to this question,
surprisingly I received one! This is worth recalling, because it is
so contrary to our usual custom. Hardly had the SMERSH men
finished “plucking” me and taken my notes on political subjects,
along with my map case, and begun to push me as quickly as
possible toward the exit, urged on by the German shellfire rattling
the windowpanes, than I heard myself firmly addressed—yes!
Across the sheer gap separating me from those left behind, the

Arrest | 19

gap created by the heavy-falling word “arrest,” across that
quarantine line not even a sound dared penetrate, came the un-
thinkable, magic words of the brigade commander:

“Solzhenitsyn. Come back here.”

With a sharp turn I broke away from the hands of the
SMERSH men and stepped back to the brigade commander. I
had never known him very well. He had never condescended to
run-of-the-mill conversations with me. To me his face had always
conveyed an order, a command, wrath. But right now it was
illuminated in a thoughtful way. Was it from shame for his own
involuntary part in this dirty business? Was it from an impulse
to rise above the pitiful subordination of a whole lifetime? Ten
days before, I had led my own reconnaissance battery almost in-
tact out of the fire pocket in which the twelve heavy guns of his
artillery battalion had been left, and now he had to renounce me
because of a piece of paper with a seal on it?

“You have . . .” he asked weightily, “a friend on the First
Ukrainian Front?”

“It’s forbidden! You have no right!” the captain and the
major of counterintelligence shouted at the colonel. In the cor-
ner, the suite of staff officers crowded closer to each other in
fright, as if they feared to share the brigade commander’s un-
believable rashness (the political officers among them already
preparing to present materials against him). But I had already
understood: I knew instantly I had been arrested because of my
correspondence with a school friend, and understood from what
direction to expect danger.

Zakhar Georgiyevich Travkin could have stopped right there!
But no! Continuing his attempt to expunge his part in this and
to stand erect before his own conscience, he rose from behind
his desk—he had never stood up in my presence in my former
life—and reached across the quarantine line that separated us
and gave me his hand, although he would never have reached
out his hand to me had I remained a free man. And pressing my
hand, while his whole suite stood there in mute horror, showing
that warmth that may appear in an habitually severe face, he said
fearlessly and precisely: |

“I wish you happiness, Captain!”

Not only was I no longer a captain, but I had been exposed

20 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

as an enemy of the people (for among us every person is totally
exposed from the moment of arrest). And he had wished happi-
ness—to an enemy?®

The panes rattled. The German shells tore up the earth two
hundred yards away, reminding one that this could not have
happened back in the rear, under the ordinary circumstances of
established existence, but only out here, under the breath of
death, which was not only close by but in the face of which all
were equal.

This is not going to be a volume of memoirs about my own
life. Therefore I am not going to recount the truly amusing de-
tails of my arrest, which was like no other. That night the
SMERSH officers gave up their last hope of being able to make
out where we were on the map—they never had been able to
read maps anyway. So they politely handed the map to me and
asked me to tell the driver how to proceed to counterintelligence
at army headquarters. I, therefore, led them and myself to that
prison, and in gratitude they immediately put me not in an
ordinary cell but in a punishment cell. And I really must describe
that closet in a German peasant house which served as a tem-
porary punishment cell.

It was the length of one human body and wide enough for
three to lie packed tightly, four at a pinch. As it happened, I was
the fourth, shoved in after midnight. The three lying there
blinked sleepily at me in the light of the smoky kerosene lantern
and moved over, giving me enough space to lie on my side, half
between them, half on top of them, until gradually, by sheer
weight, I could wedge my way in. And so four overcoats lay on
the crushed-straw-covered floor, with eight boots pointing at the
door. They slept and I burned. The more self-assured I had been
as a captain half a day before, the more painful it was to crowd
onto the floor of that closet. Once or twice the other fellows
woke up numb on one side, and we all turned over at the same -
time.

6. Here is what is most surprising of all: one can be a human being despite
everything! Nothing happened to Travkin. Not long ago, we met again cordially,
and I really got to know him for the first time. He is a retired general and an
inspector of the Hunters’ Alliance.

Arrest | 21

Toward morning they awoke, yawned, grunted, pulled up
their legs, moved into various corners, and our acquaintance
began.

“What are you in for?”

But a troubled little breeze of caution had already breathed on
me beneath the poisoned roof of SMERSH and I pretended to
be surprised:

“No idea. Do the bastards tell you?”

However, my cellmates—tankmen in soft black helmets—hid
nothing. They were three honest, openhearted soldiers—people
of a kind I had become attached to during the war years because
I myself was more complex and worse. All three had been
officers. Their shoulder boards also had been viciously torn off,
and in some places the cotton batting stuck out. On their stained
field shirts light patches indicated where decorations had been
removed, and there were dark and red scars on their faces and
arms, the results of wounds and burns. Their tank unit had, un-
fortunately, arrived for repairs in the village where the SMERSH
counterintelligence headquarters of the Forty-eighth Army was
located. Still damp from the battle of the day before, yesterday
they had gotten drunk, and on the outskirts of the village broke
into a bath where they had noticed two raunchy broads going to
bathe. The girls, half-dressed, managed to get away all right
from the soldiers’ staggering, drunken legs. But one of them, it
turned out, was the property of the army Chief of Counterintelli-
gence, no less.

Yes! For three weeks the war had been going on inside Ger-
many, and all of us knew very well that if the girls were German
they could be raped and then shot. This was almost a combat
distinction. Had they been Polish girls or our own displaced
Russian girls, they could have been chased naked around the
garden and slapped on the behind—an amusement, no more.
But just because this one was the “campaign wife” of the Chief
of Counterintelligence, right off some deep-in-the-rear sergeant
had viciously torn from three front-line officers the shoulder
boards awarded them by the front headquarters and had taken
off the decorations conferred upon them by the Presidium of the
Supreme Soviet. And now these warriors, who had gone through
the whole war and who had no doubt crushed more than one

22 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

line of enemy trenches, were waiting for a court-martial, whose
members, had it not been for their tank, could have come no-
where near the village.

We put out the kerosene lamp, which had already used up all
the air there was to breathe. A Judas hole the size of a postage
stamp had been cut in the door and through it came indirect
light from the corridor. Then, as if afraid that with the coming
of daylight we would have too much room in the punishment
cell, they tossed in a fifth person. He stepped in wearing a newish
Red Army tunic and a cap that was also new, and when he
stopped opposite the peephole we could see a fresh face with a
turned-up nose and red cheeks.

“Where are you from, brother? Who are you?”

“From the other side,” he answered briskly. “A shhpy.”

“You’re kidding!” We were astounded. (To be a spy and to
admit it—Sheinin and the brothers Tur had never written that
kind of spy story!)

“What is there to kid about in wartime?” the young fellow
sighed reasonably. “And just how else can you get back home
from being a POW? Well, you tell me!”

He had barely begun to tell us how, some days back, the
Germans had led him through the front lines so that he could
play the spy and blow up bridges, whereupon he had gone im-
mediately to the nearest battalion headquarters to turn himself
in; but the weary, sleep-starved battalion commander hadn’t
believed his story about being a spy and had sent him off to the
nurse to get a pill. And at that moment new impressions burst
upon us:

“Out for toilet call! Hands behind your backs!” hollered a
master sergeant hardhead as the door sprang open; he was just
built for swinging the tail of a 122-millimeter cannon.

A circle of machine gunners had been strung around the
peasant courtyard, guarding the path which was pointed out to
us and which went behind the barn. I was bursting with indigna-
tion that some ignoramus of a master sergeant dared to give
orders to us officers: “Hands behind your backs!” But the tank
officers put their hands behind them and I followed suit.

Back of the barn was a small square area in which the snow
had been all trampled down but had not yet melted. It was soiled

Arrest | 23

all over with human feces, so densely scattered over the whole
square that it was difficult to find a spot to place one’s two feet
and squat. However, we spread ourselves about and the five of us
did squat down. Two machine gunners grimly pointed their
machine pistols at us as we squatted, and before a minute had
passed the master sergeant brusquely urged us on:

“Come on, hurry it up! With us they do it quickly!”

Not far from me squatted one of the tankmen, a native of
Rostov, a tall, melancholy senior lieutenant. His face was
blackened by a thin film of metallic dust or smoke, but the big
red scar stretching across his cheek stood out nonetheless.

“What do you mean, with us?” he asked quietly, indicating no
intention of hurrying back to the punishment cell that still stank
of kerosene.

“In SMERSH counterintelligence!” the master sergeant shot
back proudly and more resonantly than was called for. (The
counterintelligence men used to love that tastelessly concocted
word “SMERSH,” manufactured from the initial syllables of the
words for “death to spies.” They felt it intimidated people. )

“And with us we do it slowly,” replied the senior lieutenant
thoughtfully. His helmet was pulled back, uncovering his still
untrimmed hair. His oaken, battle-hardened rear end was lifted
toward the pleasant coolish breeze.

“Where do you mean, with us?” the master sergeant barked at
him more loudly than he needed to.

“In the Red Army,” the senior lieutenant replied very quietly
from his heels, measuring with his look the cannon-tailer that
never was. i

Such were my first gulps of prison air.

Chapter 2

The History of Our
Sewage Disposal System

When people today decry the abuses of the cult, they keep
getting hung up on those years which are stuck in our throats,
°37 and ’38. And memory begins to make it seem as though
arrests were never made before or after, but only in those two
years.

: Although I have no statistics at hand, I am not afraid of erring
when I say that the wave of 1937 and 1938 was neither the only
one nor even the main one, but only one, perhaps, of the three
biggest waves which strained the murky, stinking pipes of our
prison sewers to bursting.

Before it came the wave of 1929 and 1930, the size of a good
River Ob, which drove a mere fifteen million peasants, maybe
even more, out into the taiga and the tundra. But peasants are
a silent people, without a literary voice, nor do they write com-
plaints or memoirs. No interrogators sweated out the night with
them, nor did they bother to draw up formal indictments—it was
enough to have a decree from the village soviet. This wave
poured forth, sank down into the permafrost, and even our most
active minds recall hardly a thing about it. It is as if it had not
even scarred the Russian conscience. And yet Stalin (and you
and I as well) committed no crime more heinous than this.

And after it there was the wave of 1944 to 1946, the size of
a good Yenisei, when they dumped whole nations down the
sewer pipes, not to mention millions and millions of others who

24

The History of Our Sewage Disposal System | 25

(because of us!) had been prisoners of war, or carried off to
Germany and subsequently repatriated. (This was Stalin’s
method of cauterizing the wounds so that scar tissue would form
more quickly, and thus the body politic as a whole would not
have to rest up, catch its breath, regain its strength.) But in this
wave, too, the people were of the simpler kind, and they wrote
no memoirs.

But the wave of 1937 swept up and carried off to the Archi-
pelago people of position, people with a Party past, yes, educated
people, around whom were many who had been wounded and re-
mained in the cities . . . and what a lot of them had pen in hand!
And today they are all writing, speaking, remembering: “Nine-
teen thirty-seven!” A whole Volga of the people’s grief!

But just say “Nineteen thirty-seven” to a Crimean Tatar, a
Kalmyk, a Chechen, and he’ll shrug his shoulders. And what's
1937 to Leningrad when 1935 had come before it? And for the
second-termers (i.e., repeaters), or people from the Baltic coun-
tries—weren’t 1948 and 1949 harder on them? And if sticklers
for style and geography should accuse me of having omitted
some Russian rivers, and of not yet having named some of the
waves, then just give me enough paper! There were enough
waves to use up the names of all the rivers of Russia!

It is well known that any organ withers away if it is not used.
Therefore, if we know that the Soviet Security organs, or Organs
(and they christened themselves with this vile word), praised
and exalted above all living things, have not died off even to the
extent of one single tentacle, but, instead, have grown new ones
and strengthened their muscles—it is easy to deduce that they
have had constant exercise.

Through the sewer pipes the flow pulsed. Sometimes the
pressure was higher than had been projected, sometimes lower.
But the prison sewers were never empty. The blood, the sweat,
and the urine into which we were pulped pulsed through them
continuously. The history of this sewage system is the history of
an endless swallow and flow; flood alternating with ebb and ebb
again with flood; waves pouring in, some big, some small; brooks
and rivulets flowing in from all sides; trickles oozing in through
gutters; and then just plain individually scooped-up droplets.

The chronological list which follows, in which waves made up

26 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

of millions of arrested persons are given equal attention with
ordinary streamlets of unremarkable handfuls, is quite incom-
plete, meager, miserly, and limited by my own capacity to pene-
trate the past. What is really needed is a great deal of additional
work by survivors familiar with the material.

In compiling this list the most difficult thing is to begin, partly
because the further back into the decades one goes, the fewer the
eyewitnesses who are left, and therefore the light of common
knowledge has gone out and darkness has set in, and the written
chronicles either do not exist or are kept under lock and key.
Also, it is not entirely fair to consider in a single category the
especially brutal years of the Civil War and the first years of
peacetime, when mercy might have been expected.

But even before there was any Civil War, it could be seen that
Russia, due to the makeup of its population, was obviously not
suited for any sort of socialism whatsoever. It was totally
polluted. One of the first blows of the dictatorship was directed
against the Cadets—the members of the Constitutional Demo-
cratic Party. (Under the Tsar they had constituted the most
dangerous ranks of revolution, and under the government of the
proletariat they represented the most dangerous ranks of re-
action.) At the end of November, 1917, on the occasion of the
first scheduled convening of the Constituent Assembly, which
did not take place, the Cadet Party was outlawed and arrests of
its members began. At about the same time, people associated
with the “Alliance for the Constituent Assembly” and the students
enrolled in the “soldiers’ universities” were being thrown in the jug.

Knowing the sense and spirit of the Revolution, it is easy to
guess that during these months such central prisons as Kresty in
Petrograd and the Butyrki in Moscow, and many provincial
prisons like them, were filled with wealthy men, prominent
public figures, generals and officers, as well as officials of minis-
tries and of the state apparatus who refused to carry out the
orders of the new authority. One of the first operations of the
Cheka was to arrest the entire committee of the All-Russian
Union of Employees.

The History of Our Sewage Disposal System | 27

One of the first circulars of the NK VD, in December, 1917,
stated: “In view of sabotage by officials . . . use maximum
initiative in localities, not excluding confiscations, compulsion,
and arrests.”

And even though V. I. Lenin, at the end of 1917, in order to
establish “strictly revolutionary order,” demanded “merciless
suppression of attempts at anarchy on the part of drunkards,
hooligans, counterrevolutionaries, and other persons”?—in other
words, foresaw that drunkards and hooligans represented the
principal danger to the October Revolution, with counterrevolu-
tionaries somewhere back in third place—he nonetheless put the
problem more broadly. In his essay “How to Organize the Com-
petition” (January 7 and 10, 1918), V. I. Lenin proclaimed the
common, united purpose of “purging the Russian land of all
kinds of harmful insects.”* And under the term insects he in-
cluded not only all class enemies but also “workers malingering
at their work”—for example, the typesetters of the Petrograd
Party printing shops. (That is what time does. It is difficult for
us nowadays to understand how workers who had just become
dictators were immediately inclined to malinger at work they
were doing for themselves.) And then again: “In what block
of a big city, in what factory, in what village . . . are there not

. saboteurs who call themselves intellectuals?’* True, the
forms of insect-purging which Lenin conceived of in this essay
were most varied: in some places they would be placed under
arrest, in other places set to cleaning latrines; in some, “after
having served their time in punishment cells, they would be
handed yellow tickets”; in others, parasites would be shot; else-
where you could take your pick of imprisonment “or punishment
at forced labor of the hardest kind.” Even though he perceived
and suggested the basic directions punishment should take, Vla-
dimir Ilyich proposed that “communes and communities” should
compete to find the best methods of purging.

It is not possible for us at this time fully to investigate exactly

1. Vestnik NKVD (NKVD Herald), 1917, No. 1, p. 4.

2. Lenin, Sobrannye Sochineniya (Collected Works), fifth edition, Vol. 35,
p. 68.

3. Ibid., p. 204.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid., p. 203.

28 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

who fell within the broad definition of insects; the population of
Russia was too heterogeneous and encompassed small, special
groups, entirely superfluous and, today, forgotten. The people in
the local zemstvo self-governing bodies in the provinces were,
of course, insects. People in the cooperative movement were also
insects, as were all owners of their own homes. There were not a
few insects among the teachers in the gymnasiums. The church
parish councils were made up almost exclusively of insects, and
it was insects, of course, who sang in church choirs. All priests
were insects—and monks and nuns even more so. And all those
Tolstoyans who, when they undertook to serve the Soviet govern-
ment on, for example, the railroads, refused to sign the required
oath to defend the Soviet government with gun in hand thereby
showed themselves to be insects too. (We will later see some of
them on trial.) The railroads were particularly important, for
there were indeed many insects hidden beneath railroad uni-
forms, and they had to be rooted out and some of them slapped
down. And telegraphers, for some reason, were, for the most
part, inveterate insects who had no sympathy for the Soviets.
Nor could you say a good word about Vikzhel, the All-Russian
Executive Committee of the Union of Railroad Workers, nor
about the other trade unions, which were often filled with insects
hostile to the working class.

Just those groups we have so far enumerated represent an
enormous number of people—several years’ worth of purge
activity.

In addition, how many kinds of cursed intellectuals there were
—trestless students and a variety of eccentrics, truth-seekers, and
holy fools, of whom even Peter the Great had tried in vain to
purge Russia and who are always a hindrance to a well-ordered,
strict regime.

It would have been impossible to carry out this hygienic purg-
ing, especially under wartime conditions, if they had had to
follow outdated legal processes and normal judicial procedures.
And so an entirely new form was adopted: extrajudicial reprisal,
and this thankless job was self-sacrificingly assumed by the Che-
ka, the Sentinel of the Revolution, which was the only punitive
organ in human history that combined in one set of hands in-
vestigation, arrest, interrogation, prosecution, trial, and execu-
tion of the verdict.

The History of Our Sewage Disposal System | 29

In 1918, in order to speed up the cultural victory of the Revo-
lution as well, they began to ransack the churches and throw out
the relics of saints, and to carry off church plate. Popular dis-
orders broke out in defense of the plundered churches and mon-
asteries. Here and there the alarm bells rang out, and the true
Orthodox believers rushed forth, some of them with clubs.
Naturally, some had to be expended right on the spot and others
arrested.

In considering now the period from 1918 to 1920, we are in
difficulties: Should we classify among the prison waves all those
who were done in before they even got to prison cells? And in
what classification should we put those whom the Committees of
the Poor took behind the wing of the village soviet or to the
rear of the courtyard, and finished off right there? Did the parti-
cipants in the clusters of plots uncovered in every province (two
in Ryazan; one in Kostroma, Vyshni Volochek, and Velizh;
several in Kiev; several in Moscow; one in Saratov, Chernigov,
Astrakhan, Seliger, Smolensk, Bobruisk, the Tambov Cavalry,
Chembar, Velikiye Luki, Mstislavl, etc.) at least succeed in
setting foot on the land of the Archipelago, or did they not—
and are they therefore not related to the subject of our investiga-
tions? Bypassing the repression of the now famous rebellions
(Yaroslavl, Murom, Rybinsk, Arzamas), we know of certain
events only by their names—for instance, the Kolpino executions
of June, 1918. What were they? Who were they? And where
should they be classified?

There is also no little difficulty in deciding whether we should
classify among the prison waves or on the balance sheets of the
Civil War those tens of thousands of hostages, i.e., people not
personally accused of anything, those peaceful citizens not even
listed by name, who were taken off and destroyed simply to
terrorize or wreak vengeance on a military enemy or a re-
bellious population. After August 30, 1918, the NK VD ordered
the localities “to arrest immediately all Right Socialist Revolution-
aries and to take a significant number of hostages from the bour-
geoisie and military officers.”* (This was just as if, for example,
after the attempt of Aleksandr Ulyanov’s group to assassinate the
Tsar, not only its members but all the students in Russia and a
significant number of zemstvo officials had been arrested.) By

6. Vestnik NKVD, 1918, No. 21-22, p. 1.

30 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

a decree of the Defense Council of February 15, 1919—appar-
ently with Lenin in the chair—the Cheka and the NKVD were
ordered to take hostage peasants from those localities where the
removal of snow from railroad tracks “was not proceeding satis-
factorily,” and “if the snow removal did not take place they were
to be shot.”” (At the end of 1920, by decree of the Council of
People’s Commissars, permission was given to take Social Demo-
crats as hostages too.)

But even restricting ourselves to ordinary arrests, we can note
that by the spring of 1918 a torrent of socialist traitors had
already begun that was to continue without slackening for many
years. All these parties—the SR’s, the Mensheviks, the An-
archists, the Popular Socialists—had for decades only pretended
to be revolutionaries; they had worn socialism only as a mask,
and for that they went to hard labor, still pretending. Only dur-
ing the violent course of the Revolution was the bourgeois
essence of these socialist traitors discovered. What could be more
natural than to begin arresting them! Soon after the outlawing
of the Cadets, the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly, the dis-
arming of the Preobrazhensky and other regiments, they began
in a small way to arrest, quietly at first, both SR’s and Men-
sheviks. After June 14, 1918, the day members of these parties
were excluded from all the soviets, the arrests proceeded in a
more intensive and more coordinated fashion. From July 6 on,
they began to deal with the Left SR’s in the same way, though
the Left SR’s had been cleverer and had gone on pretending
longer that they were allies of the one and only consistent party
of the proletariat. From then on, it was enough for a workers’
protest, a disturbance, a strike, to occur at any factory or in any
little town (and there were many of them in the summer of 1918;
and in March, 1921, they shook Petrograd, Moscow, and then
Kronstadt and forced the inauguration of the NEP), and—
coinciding with concessions, assurances, and the satisfaction for
the just demands of the workers—the Cheka began silently to
pick up Mensheviks and SR’s at night as being the people truly
to blame for these disorders. In the summer of 1918 and in
April and October of 1919, they jailed Anarchists right and

7. Dekrety Sovetskoi Vlasti (Decrees of the Soviet Regime), Vol. 4, Moscow,
1968, p. 627.

The History of Our Sewage Disposal System | 31

left. In 1919 they arrested all the members of the SR Central
Committee they could catch—and kept them imprisoned in the
Butyrki up to the time of their trial in 1922. In that same year,
Latsis, a leading Chekist, wrote of the Mensheviks: “People of
this sort are more than a mere hindrance to us. That is why we
remove them from our path, so they won’t get under our feet. ...
We put them away in a secluded, cozy place, in the Butyrki, and
we are going to keep them there until the struggle between
capital and labor comes to an end.”* In 1919, also, the delegates
to the Non-Party Workers Congress were arrested; as a result,
the Congress never took place.’

In 1919, suspicion of our Russians returning from abroad was
already having its effect (Why? What was their alleged assign-
ment? )—thus the officers of the Russian expeditionary force in
France were imprisoned on their homecoming.

In 1919, too, what with the big hauls in connection with such
actual and pseudo plots as the “National Center” and the “Mili-
tary Plot,” executions were carried out in Moscow, Petrograd,
and other cities on the basis of lists—in other words, free people
were simply arrested and executed immediately, and right and
left those elements of the intelligentsia considered close to the
Cadets were raked into prison. (What does the term “close to
the Cadets” mean? Not monarchist and not socialist: in other
words, all scientific circles, all university circles, all artistic, liter-
ary, yes, and, of course, all engineering circles. Except for the
extremist writers, except for the theologians and theoreticians
of socialism, all the rest of the intelligentsia, 80 percent of it,
was “close to the Cadets.”) In that category, for example, Lenin
placed the writer Korolenko—“a pitiful petty bourgeois, im-
prisoned in bourgeois prejudices.”*° He considered it was “not
amiss” for such “talents” to spend a few weeks in prison."
From Gorky’s protests we learn of individual groups that were
arrested. On September 15, 1919, Lenin replied to him: “It
is clear to us that there were some mistakes.” But: “What a

8. M. I. Latsis, Dva Goda Borby na Vnutrennom Fronte; Populyarni Obzor
Deyatelnosti ChK (Two Years of Struggle on the Home Front; Popular Review
of the Activity of the Cheka), Moscow, GIZ, 1920, p. 61.

9. Ibid., p. 60.

10. Lenin, fifth edition, Vol. 51, pp. 47, 48.

11. Ibid., p. 48.

32 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

misfortune, just think about it! What injustice!”*? And he ad-
vised Gorky “not to waste [his] energy whimpering over rotten
intellectuals.”

From January, 1919, on, food requisitioning was organized
and food-collecting detachments were set up. They encountered
resistance everywhere in the rural areas, sometimes stubborn
and passive, sometimes violent. The suppression of this opposi-
tion gave rise to an abundant flood of arrests during the course
of the next two years, not counting those who were shot on the
spot.

I am deliberately bypassing here the major part of the grinding
done by the Cheka, the Special Branches, and the Revolutionary
Tribunals as the front line advanced and cities and provinces
were occupied. And that same NKVD directive of August 30,
1918, ordered that efforts be made to ensure “the unconditional
execution of all who had been involved in White Guard work.”
But sometimes it is not clear where to draw the line. By the
summer of 1920, for example, the Civil War had not entirely
ended everywhere. But it was over on the Don; nonetheless offi-
cers were sent from there en masse—from Rostov, and from
Novocherkassk—to Archangel, whence they were transported to
the Solovetsky Islands, and, it is said, several of the barges were
sunk in the White Sea and in the Caspian Sea. Now should this
be billed to the Civil War or to the beginning of peacetime re-
construction? In Novocherkassk, in the same year, they shot the ©
_ pregnant wife of an officer because she had hidden her husband.
In what classification should she be put?

In May, 1920, came the well-known decree of the Central
Committee “on Subversive Activity in the Rear.” We know
from experience that every such decree is a call for a new wave
of widespread arrests; it is the outward sign of such a wave.

A particular difficulty—and also a particular. advantage—in
the organization of all these waves was the absence of a criminal
code or any system of criminal law whatsoever before 1922.
Only a revolutionary sense of justice (always infallible) guided
those doing the purging and managing the sewage system when
they were deciding whom to take and what to do with them.

In this survey we are not going to investigate the successive

12. Ibid., p. 47.
13, Ibid., p. 49.

The History of Our Sewage Disposal System | 33

waves of habitual criminals (ugolovniki) and nonpolitical of-
fenders (bytoviki). Therefore we will merely recall that the
country-wide poverty and shortages during the period when the
government, all institutions, and the laws themselves were being
reorganized could serve only to increase greatly the number of
thefts, robberies, assaults, bribes, and the resale of merchandise
for excessive profit (speculation). Even though these crimes
presented less danger to the existence of the Republic, they, too,
had to be repressed, and their own waves of prisoners served to
swell the waves of counterrevolutionaries. And there was specu-
lation, too, of a purely political character, as was pointed out in
the decree of the Council of People’s Commissars signed by
Lenin on July 22, 1918: “Those guilty of selling, or buying up,
or keeping for sale in the way of business food products which
have been placed under the monopoly of the Republic [A peasant
keeps grains for sale in the way of business. What else is his
business anyway?] . . . imprisonment for a term of not less than
ten years, combined with the most severe forced labor and con-
fiscation of all their property.”

From that summer on, the countryside, which had already
been strained to the utmost limits, gave up its harvest year after
year without compensation. This led to peasant revolts and, in
the upshot, suppression of the revolts and new arrests.’* It was
in 1920 that we knew (or failed to know) of the trial of the
“Siberian Peasants’ Union.” And at the end of 1920 the repres-
sion of the Tambov peasants’ rebellion began. There was no
trial for them.

But the main drive to uproot people from the Tambov villages
took place mostly in June, 1921. Throughout the province con-
centration camps were set up for the families of peasants who
had taken part in the revolts. Tracts of open field were enclosed
with barbed wire strung on posts, and for three weeks every
family of a suspected rebel was confined there. If within that
time the man of the family did not turn up to buy his family’s .
way out with his own head, they sent the family into exile.*®

Even earlier, in March, 1921, the rebellious Kronstadt sailors,

14. “The hardest-working sector of the nation was positively uprooted.”
Korolenko, letter to Gorky, August 10, 1921.

15. Tukhachevsky, “Borba s Kontrrevolyutsionnymi Vostaniyami” (“The

Struggle Against Counterrevolutionary Revol) in Voina i Revolyutsiya (War
and Revolution), 1926, No. 7/8.

34 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

minus those who had been shot, were sent to the islands of the
Archipelago via the Trubetskoi bastion of the Peter and Paul
Fortress.

That same year, 1921, began with Cheka Order No. 10, dated
January 8: “To intensify the repression of the bourgeoisie.” Now,
when the Civil War had ended, repression was not to be reduced but
intensified! Voloshin has pictured for us in several of his poems how
this worked out in the Crimea.

In the summer of 1921, the State Commission for Famine Relief,
including Kuskova, Prokopovich, Kishkin, and others, was arrested.
They had tried to combat the unprecedented famine in Russia. The
heart of the matter, however, was that theirs were the wrong hands to
be offering food and could not be allowed to feed the starving. The
chairman of this commission, the dying Korolenko, who was pardoned,
called the destruction of the commission “the worst of dirty political
tricks, a dirty political trick by the government.”18

In that same year the practice of arresting students began (for
example, the group of Yevgeniya Doyarenko in the Timiryazev
Academy) for “criticism of the system” (not in public, merely
in conversation among themselves). Such cases, however, were
evidently few, because the group in question was interrogated
by Menzhinsky and Yagoda personally.

Also in 1921 the arrests of members of all non-Bolshevik
parties were expanded and systematized. In fact, all Russia’s
political parties had been buried, except the victorious one. (Oh,
do not dig a grave for someone else!) And so that the dissolution
of these parties would be irreversible, it was necessary that their
members should disintegrate and their physical bodies too.

Not one citizen of the former Russian state who had ever
joined a party other than the Bolshevik Party could avoid his
fate. He was condemned unless, like Maisky or Vyshinsky, he
succeeded in making his way across the planks of the wreck to
the Bolsheviks. He might not be arrested in the first group. He
might live on, depending on how dangerous he was believed to
be, until 1922, 1932, or even 1937, but the lists were kept; his

16. Korolenko’s letter to Gorky, September 14, 1921. Korolenko also reminds
us of a particularly important situation in the prisons of 1921: “Everywhere
they are saturated with typhus.” This has been confirmed by Skripnikova and
others imprisoned at the time.

The History of Our Sewage Disposal System | 35

turn would and did come; he was arrested or else politely invited
to an interrogation, where he was asked just one question: Had
he been a member of such and such, from then till then? (There
were also questions about hostile activity, but the first question
decided everything, as is clear to us now, decades later.) From
there on his fate might vary. Some were put immediately in one
of the famous Tsarist central prisons—fortunately, all the
Tsarist central prisons had been well preserved—and some
socialists even ended up in the very same cells and with the very
same jailers they had had before. Others were offered the oppor-
tunity of going into exile—oh, not for long, just for two or
three years. And some had it even easier: they were merely given
a minus (a certain number of cities were forbidden) and told
to pick out a new place of residence themselves, and for the
future would they please be so kind as to stay fixed in that one
place and await the pleasure of the GPU.

This whole operation was stretched out over many years be-
cause it was of primary importance that it be stealthy and un-
noticed. It was essential to clean out, conscientiously, socialists
of every other stripe from Moscow, Petrograd, the ports, the
industrial centers, and, later on, the outlying provinces as well.
This was a grandiose silent game of solitaire, whose rules were
totally incomprehensible to its contemporaries, and whose out-
lines we can appreciate only now. Someone’s far-seeing mind,
someone’s neat hands, planned it all, without letting one wasted
minute go by. They picked up a card which had spent three
years in one pile and softly placed it on another pile. And the
person who had been imprisoned in a central prison was thereby
shifted into exile—and a good way off. Someone who had served
out a “minus” sentence was sent into exile, too, but out of sight
of the rest of the “minus” category, or else from exile to exile,
and then back again into the central prison—but this time a
different one. Patience, overwhelming patience, was the trait of
the person playing out the solitaire. And without any noise,
without any outcry, the members of all the other parties slipped
gradually out of sight, lost all connection with the places and
people where they and their revolutionary activities were known,
and thus—imperceptibly and mercilessly—was prepared the
annihilation of those who had once raged against tyranny at

36 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

student meetings and had clanked their Tsarist shackles in
pride.”

In this game of the Big Solitaire, the majority of the old
political prisoners, survivors of hard labor, were destroyed, for
it was primarily the SR’s and the Anarchists—not the Social
Democrats—who had received the harshest sentences from the
Tsarist courts. They in particular had made up the population of
the Tsarist hard-labor political prisons.

There was justice in the priorities of destruction, however; in
1920 they were all offered the chance to renounce in writing
their parties and party ideologies. Some declined—and they,
naturally, came up first for annihilation. Others signed such re-
nunciations, and thereby added a few years to their lifetimes. But
their turn, too, came implacably, and their heads rolled implac-
ably from their shoulders.”

In the spring of 1922 the Extraordinary Commission for
Struggle Against Counterrevolution, Sabotage, and Speculation,
the Cheka, recently renamed the GPU, decided to intervene in
church affairs. It was called on to carry out a “church revolu-
tion”—to remove the existing leadership and replace it with one
which would have only one ear turned to heaven and the other
to the Lubyanka. The so-called “Living Church” people seemed
to go along with this plan, but without outside help they could
not gain control of the church apparatus. For this reason, the
Patriarch Tikhon was arrested and two resounding trials were
held, followed by the execution in Moscow of those who had
publicized the Patriarch’s appeal and, in Petrograd, of the Metro-
politan Veniamin, who had attempted to hinder the transfer of
ecclesiastical power to the “Living Church” group. Here and
there in the provincial centers and even further down in the

17. V. G. Korolenko wrote to Gorky, June 29, 1921: “History will someday
note that the Bolshevik Revolution used the same means to deal with true
revolutionaries and socalists as did the Tsarist regime, in other words, purely
police measures.”

18. Sometimes, reading a newspaper article, one is astonished to the point
of disbelief. In Izvestiya of May 24, 1959, one could read that a year after
Hitler came to power Maximilian Hauke was arrested for belonging to none
other than the Communist Party. Was he destroyed? No, they sentenced him
to two years. After this was he, naturally, sentenced to a second term? No,
he was released. You can interpret that as you please! He proceeded to live
quietly and build an underground organization, in connection with which the
Izvestiya article on his courage appeared..

The History of Our Sewage Disposal System | 37

administrative districts, metropolitans and bishops were arrested,
and, as always, in the wake of the big fish, followed shoals of
smaller fry: archpriests, monks, and deacons. These arrests were
not even reported in the press. They also arrested those who
refused to swear to support the “Living Church” “renewal”
movement.

Men of religion were an inevitable part of every annual
“catch,” and their silver locks gleamed in every cell and in every
prisoner transport en route to the Solovetsky Islands.

From the early twenties on, arrests were also made among
groups of theosophists, mystics, spiritualists. (Count Palen’s
group used to keep official transcripts of its communications with
the spirit world.) Also, religious societies and philosophers of the
Berdyayev circle. The so-called “Eastern Catholics”—followers
of Vladimir Solovyev—were arrested and destroyed in passing,
as was the group of A. I. Abrikosova. And, of course, ordinary
Roman Catholics—Polish Catholic priests, etc.—were arrested,
too, as part of the normal course of events.

However, the root destruction of religion in the country, which
throughout the twenties and thirties was one of the most important
goals of the GPU-NKVD, could be realized only by mass arrests
of Orthodox believers. Monks and nuns, whose black habits had
been a distinctive feature of Old Russian life, were intensively
rounded up on every hand, placed under arrest, and sent into
exile. They arrested and sentenced active laymen. The circles kept
getting bigger, as they raked in ordinary believers as well, old
people, and particularly women, who were the most stubborn be-
lievers of all and who, for many long years to come, would be
called “nuns” in transit prisons and in camps.

True, they were supposedly being arrested and tried not for
their actual faith but for openly declaring their convictions and
for bringing up their children in the same spirit. As Tanya Khod-
kevich wrote:

You can pray freely~
But just so God alone can hear.

(She received a ten-year sentence for these verses.) A person
convinced that he possessed spiritual truth was required to conceal
it from his own children! In the twenties the religious education of

38 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

children was classified as a political crime under Article 58-10 of
the Code—in other words, counterrevolutionary propaganda!
True, one was still permitted to renounce one’s religion at one’s
trial: it didn’t often happen but it nonetheless did happen that
the father would renounce his religion and remain at home to raise
the children while the mother went to the Solovetsky Islands.
(Throughout all those years women manifested great firmness in
their faith.) All persons convicted of religious activity received
tenners, the longest term then given.

(In those years, particularly in 1927, in purging the big cities
for the pure society that was coming into being, they sent pros-
titutes to the Solovetsky Islands along with the “nuns.” Those
lovers of a sinful earthly life were given three-year sentences under
a more lenient article of the Code. The conditions in prisoner
transports, in transit prisons, and on the Solovetsky Islands were
not of a sort to hinder them from plying their merry trade among
the administrators and the convoy guards. And three years later
they would return with laden suitcases to the places they had come
from. Religious prisoners, however, were prohibited from ever
returning to their children and their home areas.)

As early as the early twenties, waves appeared that were purely
national in character—at first not very large in proportion to the
populations of their homelands, especially by Russian yardsticks:
Mussavatists from Azerbaijan; Dashnaks from Armenia; Georg-
ian Mensheviks; and Turkmenian Basmachi, who were resisting
the establishment of Soviet power in Central Asia. (The first
Central Asian soviets were Russian in makeup by an overwhelm-
ing majority, and were therefore seen as outposts of Russian
power.) In 1926 the Zionist society of “Hehalutz” was exiled in
toto—since it had failed to respond to the all-powerful upsurge of
internationalism.

Among subsequent generations, a picture has evolved of the
twenties as some kind of holiday of totally unlimited freedom. In
this book we shall encounter people who viewed the twenties quite
differently. The non-Party students at this time sought “autonomy
for higher educational institutions,” the right of assembly, and the
removal from the curriculum of excessive political indoctrination.
Arrests were the answer. These were intensified during holidays—
for example, on May 1, 1924. In 1925, about one hundred Lenin-

The History of Our Sewage Disposal System | 39

grad students were sentenced to three years in political detention
for reading the Sotsialistichesky Vestnik—the organ of the Men-
sheviks abroad—and for studying Plekhanov. (In his youth Ple-
khanov himself had gotten off far more lightly for speaking out
against the government in front of Kazan Cathedral.) In 1925
they had already begun to arrest the first (young) Trotskyites.
(Two naive Red Army men, remembering the Russian tradition,
began to collect funds for the arrested Trotskyites—and they, too,
were put in political detention. )

And, of course, it is obvious that the exploiting classes were not
spared. Throughout the twenties the hunt continued for former
officers who had managed to survive: “Whites” (those who had
not already earned execution during the Civil War); “White-
Reds,” who had fought on both sides; and “Tsarist Reds,” Tsarist
officers who had gone over to the Red Army but had not served in
it for the whole period or who had gaps in their army service
records and no documents to account for them. They were truly
put through the mill because instead of being sentenced immedi-
ately they, too, were put through the solitaire game: endless ver-
ifications, limitations on the kind of work they could do and on
where they could live; they were taken into custody, released,
taken into custody again. And only gradually did they proceed
to the camps, from which they did not return.

However, sending these officers to the Archipelago did not end
the problem but only set it in motion. After all, their mothers,
wives, and children were still at liberty. With the help of unerring
social analysis it was easy to see what kind of mood they were in
after the heads of their households had been arrested. And thus
they simply compelled their own arrest too! And one more wave
was set rolling.

In the twenties there was an amnesty for Cossacks who had
taken part in the Civil War. Many of them returned from the
island of Lemnos to the Kuban, where they were given land. All
of them were subsequently arrested.

And, of course, all former state officials had gone into hiding
and were likewise liable to be hunted down. They had hidden well
and disguised themselves cleverly, making use of the fact that
there was as yet no internal passport system nor any unified system
of work-books in the Republic—and they managed to creep into

40 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

Soviet institutions. In such cases, slips of the tongue, chance
recognitions, and the denunciations of neighbors helped battle-
intelligence—so to speak. (Sometimes sheer accident took a
hand. Solely out of a love of order, a certain Mova kept at home
a list of all former employees of the provincial judiciary. This was
discovered by accident in 1925, and they were all arrested and
shot. )

And so the waves rolled on—for “concealment of social origin”
and for “former social origin.” This received the widest interpreta-
tion. They arrested members of the nobility for their social origin.
They arrested members of their families. Finally, unable to draw
even simple distinctions, they arrested members of the “individual
nobility”—i.e., anybody who had simply graduated from a uni-
_ versity. And once they had been arrested, there was no way back.
You can’t undo what has been done! The Sentinel of the Revolu-
tion never makes a mistake!

(No. There were a few ways back! The counterwaves were
thin, sparse, but they did sometimes break through. The first is
worthy of mention right heré. Among the wives and daughters of
the nobility and the officers there were quite often women of out-
standing personal qualities and attractive appearance. Some suc-
ceeded in breaking through in a small reverse wave! They were the
ones who remembered that life is given to us only once and that
nothing is more precious to us than our own life. They offered
their services to the Cheka-GPU as informers, as colleagues, in
any capacity whatsoever—and those who were liked were ac-
cepted. These were the most fertile of all informers! They helped
the GPU a great deal, because “former” people trusted them. Here
one can name the last Princess Vyazemskaya, a most prominent
postrevolutionary informer [as was her son on the Solovetsky
Islands]. And Konkordiya Nikolayevna Josse was evidently a
woman of brilliant qualities: her husband was an officer who had
been shot in her presence, and she herself was exiled to the
Solovetsky Islands. But she managed to beg her way out and to
set up a salon near the Big Lubyanka which the important figures
of that establishment loved to frequent. She was not arrested again
until 1937, along with her Yagoda customers. )

It is strange to recount, but as a result of an absurd tradition
the Political Red Cross had been preserved from Old Russia.

The History of Our Sewage Disposal System | 41

There were.three branches: the Moscow branch (Y. Peshkova-
Vinaver); the Kharkov (Sandormirskaya); and the Petrograd.
The one in Moscow behaved itself and was not dissolved until ©
1937. The one in Petrograd (the old Narodnik Shevtsov, the
cripple Gartman, and Kocherovsky) adopted an intolerably im-
pudent stance, mixed into political cases, tried to get support
- from such former inmates of the Schlüsselburg Prison as Novorus-
sky, who had been convicted in the same case as Lenin’s brother,
Aleksandr Ulyanov, and helped not only socialists but also KR’s
—Counter-Revolutionaries. In 1926 it was shut down and its
leaders were sent into exile.

The years go by, and everything that has not been freshly re-
called to us is wiped from our memory. In the dim distance, we
see the year 1927 as a careless, well-fed year of the still untrun-
cated NEP. But in fact it was tense; it shuddered as newspaper
headlines exploded; and it was considered at the time, and por-
trayed to us then, as the threshold of a war for world revolution.
The assassination of the Soviet ambassador in Warsaw, which
filled whole columns of the papers that June, aroused Mayakovsky
to dedicate four thunderous verses to the subject.

But here’s bad luck for you: Poland offered an apology; Voi-
kov’s lone assassin was arrested there—and so how and against
whom was the poet’s appeal to be directed?”

With cohesion, |
construction,
grit,
and repression `

Wring the neck
. of this gang run riot!

Who was to be repressed? Whose neck should be wrung? It was
then that the so-called Voikov draft began. As always happened
_ when there were incidents of disturbance or tension, they arrested
former people: Anarchists, SR’s, Mensheviks, and also the intel-

. 19. Evidently, the monarchist in question assassinated Voikov as an act of
private vengeance: it is said that as Urals Provincial Commissar of Foodstuffs,
in July, 1918, P. L. Voikov had directed the destruction of all traces of the
shooting of the Tsar’s family (the dissection and dismemberment of the corpses,
the cremation of the remains, and the dispersal of the ashes).

42 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

ligentsta as such. Indeed, who else was there to arrest in the cities?
Not the working class!

But the old “close-to-the-Cadets” intellieaniteta had already
been thoroughly shaken up, starting in 1919. Had the time not
come to shake up that part of the intelligentsia which imagined
itself to be progressive? To give the studénts a once-over? Once
again Mayakovsky came to the rescue:

Think
about the Komsomol
for days and for weeks!

Look over
your ranks,
watch them with care.

Are all of them
really
Komsomols? —

Or are they
only
pretending to be?

A convenient world outlook gives rise to a convenient juridical
term: social prophylaxis. It was introduced and accepted, and it
was immediately understood by all. (Lazar Kogan, one of the
bosses of the White Sea Canal construction, would, in fact, soon
say: “I believe that you personally were not guilty of anything.
But, as an educated person, you have to understand that social
prophylaxis was being widely applied!”) And when else, in fact,
should unreliable fellow travelers, all that shaky intellectual rot,
be arrested, if not on the eve of the war for world revolution?
When the big war actually began, it would be too late.

And so in Moscow they began a systematic search, block by
block. Someone had to be arrested everywhere. The slogan was:
“We are going to bang our fist on the table so hard that the world
will shake with terror!” It was to the Lubyanka, to the Butyrki,
that the Black Marias, the passenger cars, the enclosed trucks, the
open hansom cabs kept moving, even by day. There was a jam at
the gates, a jam in the courtyard. They didn’t have time to unload
and register those they’d arrested. (And the same situation existed

The History of Our Sewage Disposal System | 43

in other cities. In Rostov-on-the-Don during those days the floor
was so crowded in the cellar of House 33 that the newly arrived
Boiko could hardly find a place to sit down. )

A typical example from this wave: Several dozen young people
got together for some kind of musical evening which had not been
authorized ahead of time by the GPU. They listened to music and
then drank tea. They got the money for the tea by voluntarily
contributing their own kopecks. It was quite clear, of course,
that this music was a cover for counterrevolutionary sentiments,
and that the money was being collected not for tea but to assist
the dying world bourgeoisie. And they were all arrested and given
from three to ten years—Anna Skripnikova getting five, while
Ivan Nikolayevich Varentsov and the other organizers of the
affair who refused to confess were shot!

And in that same year, somewhere in Paris, a group of Russian
émigré Lycée graduates gathered to celebrate the traditional
Pushkin holiday. A report of this was published in the papers. It
was Clearly an intrigue on the part of mortally wounded imperial-
ism, and as a result all Lycée graduates still left in the U.S.S.R.
were arrested, as were the so-called “law students” (graduates of
another such privileged special school of prerevolutionary Rus-
sia). 7
Only the size of SLON—the Solovetsky Special Purpose
Camp—limited for the time being the scale of the Voikov draft.
But the Gulag Archipelago had already begun its malignant life
and would shortly metastasize throughout the whole body of the
nation.

A new taste had been acquired and a new appetite began to
grow. The time had long since arrived to crush the technical intel-
ligentsia, which had come to regard itself as too irreplaceable and
had not gotten used to catching instructions on the wing.

In other words, we never did trust the engineers—and from
the very first years of the Revolution we saw to it that those
lackeys and servants of former capitalist bosses were kept in line
by healthy suspicion and surveillance by the workers. However,
during the reconstruction period, we did permit them to work in
our industries, while the whole force of the class assault was
directed against the rest of the intelligentsia. But the more our own
economic leadership matured—in VSNKh (the Supreme Council

44 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

of the Economy) and Gosplan (the State Planning Commission)
—the more the number of plans increased, and the more those
plans overlapped and conflicted with one another, the clearer
became the old engineers’ basic commitment to wrecking, their
insincerity, slyness, venality. The Sentinel of the Revolution nar-
rowed its eyes with even greater vigilance—and wherever it di-
rected its narrowed gaze it immediately discovered a nest of
wreckers.

This therapy continued full speed from 1927 on, and immedi-
ately exposed to the proletariat all the causes of our economic
failures and shortages. There was wrecking in the People’s Com-
missariat of Railroads—that was why it was hard to get aboard a
train, why there were interruptions in supplies. There was wreck-
ing in the Moscow Electric Power System—and interruptions in
power. There was wrecking in the oil industry—hence the short-
age of kerosene. There was wrecking in textiles—hence nothing
for a workingman to wear. In the coal industry there was colossal
wrecking—hence no heat! In the metallurgy, defense, machinery,
shipbuilding, chemical, mining, gold and platinum industries, in
irrigation, everywhere there were these pus-filled boils of wreck-
ing! Enemies with slide rules were on all sides. The GPU puffed
and panted in its efforts to grab off and drag off the “wreckers.”
In the capitals and in the provinces, GPU collegiums and prole-
tarian courts kept hard at work, sifting through this viscous
sewage, and every day the workers gasped to learn (and some-
times they didn’t learn) from the papers of new vile deeds. They
learned about Palchinsky, von Meck, and Velichko,”° and how
many others who were nameless. Every industry, every factory,
and every handicraft artel had to find wreckers in its ranks, and
no sooner had they begun to look than they found them (with the
help of the GPU). If any prerevolutionary engineer was not yet
exposed as a traitor, then he could certainly be suspected of being
one.

And what accomplished villains these old engineers were! What
diabolical ways to sabotage they found! Nikolai Karlovich von
Meck, of the People’s Commissariat of Railroads, pretended to

20. A. F. Velichko, a military engineer, former professor of the Military
Academy of the General Staff, and a lieutenant general, had been in charge of
the Administration for Military Transport in the Tsarist War j He
was shot. Oh, how useful he would have been in 1941!

The History of Our Sewage Disposal System | 45

be terribly devoted to the development of the new economy, and
would hold forth for hours on end about the economic problems
involved in the construction of socialism, and he loved to give
advice. One such pernicious piece of advice was to increase the
size of freight trains and not worry about heavier than average
loads. The GPU exposed von Meck, and he was shot: his ob-
jective had been to wear out rails and roadbeds, freight cars and
locomotives, so as to leave the Republic without railroads in case
of foreign military intervention! When, not long afterward, the
new People’s Commissar of Railroads, Comrade Kaganovich,
ordered that average loads should be increased, and even doubled
and tripled them (and for this discovery received the Order of
Lenin along with others of our leaders )—the malicious engineers
who protested became known as limiters. They raised the
outcry that this was too much, and would result in the breakdown
of the rolling stock, and they were rightly shot for their lack of
faith in the possibilities of socialist transport.

These limiters were pursued for several years. In all branches
of the economy they brandished their formulas and calculations
and refused to understand that bridges and lathes could respond to
the enthusiasm of the personnel. (These were the years when all
the norms of folk psychology were turned inside out: the circum-
spect folk wisdom expressed in such a proverb as “Haste makes
waste” was ridiculed, and the ancient saying that “The slower you
go, the farther you’ll get” was turned inside out.) The only thing
which at times delayed the arrest of the old engineers was the
absence of a, new batch to take their place. Nikolai Ivanovich
Ladyzhensky, chief engineer of defense plants in Izhevsk, was first
arrested for “limitation theories” and “blind faith in safety factors”
(which explained why he considered inadequate the funds al-
located by Ordzhonikidze for factory expansion).?* Then they
put him under house arrest and ordered him back to work in his
old job. Without him the work was collapsing. He put it back in
shape. But the funds allocated were just as inadequate as they had
been earlier, and so once again he was thrown in prison, this time
for “incorrect use of funds”: the funds were insufficient, they

21. They say that when Ordzhonikidze used to talk with the old engineers,
he would put one pistol on his desk beside his right hand and another beside
his left.

46 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

charged, because the chief engineer had used them inefficiently!
Ladyzhensky died in camp after a year of timbering.

Thus in the course of a few years they broke the back of the
Old Russian engineers who had constituted the glory of the
country, who were the beloved heroes of such writers as Garin-
Mikhailovsky, Chekhov, and Zamyatin.

It is to be understood, of course, that in this wave, as in all of
them, other people were taken too: for example, those who had
been near and dear to and connected with those doomed. I hesi-
tate to sully the shining bronze countenance of the Sentinel of the
Revolution, yet I must: they also arrested persons who refused to
become informers. We would ask the reader to keep in mind at all
times, but especially in connection with the first postrevolutionary
decade, this entirely secret wave, which never surfaced in public:
at that time people still had their pride, and many of them quite
failed to comprehend that morality is a relative thing, having only
a narrow class meaning, and they dared to reject the employment
offered them, and they were all punished without mercy. In fact,
at this time young Magdalena Edzhubova was supposed to act as
an informer on a group of engineers, and she not only dared to
refuse but also told her guardian (it was against him she was sup-
posed to inform). However, he was arrested soon anyway, and in
the course of the investigation he confessed everything. Edzhu-
bova, who was pregnant, was arrested for “revealing an opera-
tional secret” and was sentenced to be shot—but subsequently
managed to get off with a twenty-five-year string of sentences. In
that same year, 1927, though in a completely different milieu,
among the leading Kharkov Communists, Nadezhda Vitalyevna
Surovets refused to become an informer and spy on members of
the Ukrainian government. For this she was arrested by the GPU,
and not until a quarter of a century later did she manage to
emerge, barely alive, in the Kolyma. As for those who didn’t sur-
vive—of them we know nothing. |

(In the thirties this wave of the disobedient fell off to zero:
if they asked you to, then it meant you had to inform—where
would you hide? “The weakest go to the wall.” “If I don’t, some-
one else will.” “Better me than someone bad.” Meanwhile there
were plenty of volunteers; you couldn’t get away from them: it
was both profitable and praiseworthy. )

The History of Our Sewage Disposal System | 47

In 1928 in Moscow the big Shakhty case came to trial—big in
terms of the publicity it was given, in the startling confessions
and self-flagellation of the defendants (though not yet all of
them). Two years later, in September, 1930, the famine organ-
izers were tried with a great hue and cry. (They were the ones!
There they are!) There were forty-eight wreckers in the food
industry. At the end of 1930, the trial of the Promparty was put
on with even greater fanfare. It had been faultlessly rehearsed.
In this case every single defendant took upon himself the blame
for every kind of filthy rubbish—and then, like a monument un-
veiled, there arose before the eyes of the workers the grandiose,
cunningly contrived skein in which all the separate wrecking cases
previously exposed were tied into one diabolical knot along with
Milyukov, Ryabushinsky, Deterding, and Poincaré.

As we begin to understand our judicial practices, we realize
now that the public trials were only the surface indications of the
mole’s tunnel, and that all the main digging lay beneath the sur-
face. At these trials only a small number of those arrested were
produced in court—only those who agreed to the unnatural prac-
tice of accusing themselves and others in the hope of getting off
more easily. The majority of the engineers, who had the courage
and intelligence to reject and refute the interrogators’ stupidities,
were tried out of earshot. But even though they did not confess,
they got the same tenners from the Collegium of the GPU.

The waves flowed underground through the pipes; they pro-
vided sewage disposal for the life flowering on the surface.

It was precisely at this moment that an important step was
taken toward universal participation in sewage disposal, universal
distribution of responsibility for it. Those who had not yet been
swept bodily down the sewer hatches, who had not yet been
carried through the pipes to the Archipelago, had to march up
above, carrying banners praising the trials, and rejoicing at the
judicial reprisals. (And this was very farsighted! Decades would
pass, and history would have its eyes opened, but the interroga-
tors, judges, and prosecutors would turn out to be no more guilty
than you and I, fellow citizens! The reason we possess our worthy
gray heads is that in our time we worthily voted “for.”)

Stalin carried out the first such effort in connection with the

48 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

trial of the famine organizers—and how could it not succeed when
everyone was starving in bounteous Russia, and everyone was
always looking about and asking: “Where did all our dear bread
get to?” Therefore, before the court verdict, the workers and
employees wrathfully voted for the death penalty for the scoun-
drels on trial. And by the time of the Promparty trial, there were
universal meetings and demonstrations (including even school-
children). It was the newspaper march of millions, and the roar
rose outside the windows of the courtroom: “Death! Death!
Death!”

At this turning point in our history, there were some lonely
voices of protest or abstention—and very, very great bravery was
required to say “No!” in the midst of that roaring chorus of ap-
proval. It is incomparably easier today! (Yet even today people
don’t very often vote “against.” ) To the extent that we know about
them, it was those same spineless, slushy intellectuals. At the
meeting of the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute, Professor Dmitri
Apollinaryevich Rozhansky abstained (he was an enemy of cap-
ital punishment in general, you see; in the language of science,
you see, this was an irreversible process), and he was arrested
then and there! The student Dima Olitsky abstained and was ar-
rested then and there! Thus all these protests were silenced at the
very source.

So far as we know, the gray-mustached working class approved
these executions. So far as we know, from the blazing Komsomols
right up to the Party leaders and the legendary army commanders,
the entire vanguard waxed unanimous in approving these execu-
tions. Famous revolutionaries, theoreticians, and prophets, seven
years before their own inglorious destruction, welcomed the roar
of the crowd, not guessing then that their own time stood on the
threshold, that soon their own names would be dragged down in
that roar of “Scum!” “Filth”

In fact, for the engineers the rout soon came to an end. At the
beginning of 1931 Iosif Vissarionovich spake his “Six Condi-
tions” for construction. And His Autocracy vouchsafed as the fifth
condition: We must move from a policy of destruction of the old
technical intelligentsia to a policy of concern for it, of making
use of it.

Concern for it! What had happened in the meantime to our just

The History of Our Sewage Disposal System | 49

wrath? Where had all our terrible accusations gone to? At this
very moment, as it happened, a trial of “wreckers” in the porcelain
industry was under way (they had been playing their filthy tricks
even there! ). All the defendants had damned each other in unison
and confessed to everything—and suddenly they cried out in
unison again: “We are innocent!” And they were freed!

(There was even a small reverse wave to be remarked in this
particular year: some engineers who had already been sentenced
or put under interrogation were released. Thus D. A. Rozhansky
came back. Should we not say he had won his duel with Stalin?
And that if people had been heroic in exercising their civil re-
sponsibilities, there would never have been any reason to write
either this chapter or this whole book?)

That same year Stalin was still engaged in grinding beneath his
hoof the long-since prostrate Mensheviks. (There was a public
trial in March, 1931, of the “All-Union Bureau of Mensheviks,”
Groman, Sukhanov,”? and Yakubovich, and a certain number of
small, scattered, unannounced arrests took place in addition.)

And suddenly Stalin “reconsidered.”

The White Sea folk say of the tide, the water reconsiders,
meaning the moment just before it begins to fall. Well, of course,
it is inappropriate to compare the murky soul of Stalin with the
water of the White Sea. And perhaps he didn’t reconsider any-
thing whatever. Nor was there any ebb tide. But one more miracle
happened that year. In 1931, following the trial of the Prom-
party, a grandiose trial of the Working Peasants Party was being
prepared—on the grounds that they existed (never, in actual
fact!) as an enormous organized underground force among the
rural intelligentsia, including leaders of consumer and agricultural
cooperatives and the more advanced upper layer of the peas-
antry, and supposedly were preparing to overthrow the dictator-
ship of the proletariat. At the trial of the Promparty this Working
Peasants Party—the TKP—was referred to as if it were already
well known and under detention. The interrogation apparatus of

22. The Sukhanov referred to here was the same Sukhanov in whose apart-
ment, on the Karpovka, in Petrograd, and with whose knowledge (and the
guides there nowadays are lying when they say it was without his knowledge),

the Bolshevik Central Committee met on October 10, 1917, and adopted its
decision to launch an armed uprising.

50 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

the GPU was working flawlessly: thousands of defendants had al-
ready fully confessed their adherence to the TKP and participa-
tion in its criminal plans. And no less than two hundred thousand
“members” altogether were promised by the GPU. Mentioned as
“heading” the party were the agricultural economist Aleksandr
Vasilyevich Chayanov; the future “Prime Minister” N. D. Kon-
dratyev; L. N. Yurovsky; Makarov; and Aleksei Doyarenko, a
professor from the Timiryazev Academy (future Minister of
Agriculture) .”8

Then all of a sudden, one lovely night, Stalin reconsidered.
Why? Maybe we will never know. Did he perhaps wish to save
his soul? Too soon for that, it would seem. Did his sense of humor
come to the fore—was it all so deadly, monotonous, so bitter-
tasting? But no one would ever dare accuse Stalin of having a
sense of humor! Likeliest of all, Stalin simply figured out that the
whole countryside, not just 200,000 people, would soon die of
famine anyway, so why go to the trouble? And instantly the
whole TKP trial was called off. All those who had “confessed”
were told they could repudiate their confessions (one can picture
their happiness! ). And instead of the whole big catch, only the
small group of Kondratyev and Chayanov was hauled in and
tried.* (In 1941, the charge against the tortured Vavilov was
that the TKP had existed and he had been its head.)

Paragraph piles on paragraph, year on year—and yet there is
no way we can describe in sequence everything that took place
(but the GPU did its job effectively! The GPU never let anything
get by!). But we must always remember that:

e Religious believers, of course, were being arrested uninter-
ruptedly. (There were, nonetheless, certain special dates and peak
periods. There was a “night of struggle against religion” in
Leningrad on Christmas Eve, 1929, when they arrested a large
part of the religious intelligentsia and held them—not just until
morning either. And that was certainly no “Christmas tale.”

23. He might well have been a better one than those who held the job for
the next forty years! But how strange is human fate! As a matter of principle,
Doyarenko was always nonpolitical! When his daughter used to bring home
fellow students who expressed opinions savoring of Socialist Revolutionary
views, he made them leave!

24. Kondratyev, sentenced to solitary confinement, became mentally ill there

and died. Yurovsky also died. Chayanov was exiled to Alma-Ata after five years
in solitary and was arrested again there in 1948.

The History of Our Sewage Disposal System | 51

Then in February, 1932, again in Leningrad, many churches
were Closed simultaneously, while, at the same time, large-scale
arrests were made among the clergy. And there are still more
dates and places, but they haven’t been reported to us by any-
one. )

e Non-Orthodox sects were also under constant attack, even
those sympathetic to Communism. (Thus, in 1929, they arrested
every last member of the communes between Sochi and Khosta.
These communes ran everything—both production and distribu-
tion—on a Communist basis, and it was all done fairly and
honestly, in a way the rest of the country won’t achieve in a hun-
dred years. But, alas, they were too literate; they were well read
in religious literature; and atheism was not their philosophy,
which combined Baptist and Tolstoyan beliefs with those of Yoga.
It appeared that such a commune was criminal and that it could
not bring people happiness. )

In the twenties, a large group of Tolstoyans was exiled to the
foothills of the Altai and there they established communal settle-
ments jointly with the Baptists. When the construction of the
Kuznetsk industrial complex began, they supplied it with food
products. Then arrests began—first the teachers (they were not
teaching in accordance with the government programs), and
the children ran after the cars, shouting. And after that the com-
mune leaders were taken.

e The Big Solitaire game played with the socialists went on and
on uninterruptedly—of course.

e In 1929, also, those historians who had not been sent abroad
in time were arrested: Platonov, Tarle, Lyubavsky, Gotye, Li-
khachev, Izmailov, and the outstanding literary scholar M. M.
Bakhtin.

e From one end of the country to the other, nationalities kept
pouring in. The Yakuts were imprisoned after the revolt of 1928.
The Buryat-Mongols were imprisoned after the uprising of 1929
—and they say about 35,000 were shot, a figure it has been im-
possible to verify. The Kazakhs were imprisoned after Budenny’s
cavalry heroically crushed their revolt in 1930 and 1931. The
Union for Liberation of the Ukraine was put on trial at the be-
ginning of 1930 (Professor Yefremov, Chekhovsky, Nikovsky,
etc.), and, knowing the ratio in our country of what is public to

52 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

what is secret, how many others followed in their footsteps? How
many were secretly arrested?

Then came the time—slowly, it is true, but surely—when it
was the turn of the members of the ruling Party to do time in
prison! At first—from 1927 to 1929—it was a question of the
“workers’ opposition,” in other words, the Trotskyites, who had
chosen themselves such an unsuccessful leader. They numbered,
hundreds at the start; soon there would be thousands. But it’s
the first step that’s the hardest! Just as these Trotskyites had
observed with approval the arrest of members of other parties, so
the rest of the Party now watched approvingly as the Trotskyites
were arrested. But everyone would have his turn. The nonexistent
“rightist opposition” would come later, and, limb by limb, be-
ginning with its own tail, the ravenous maw would devour itself

. right up to its head.

From 1928 on, it was time to call to a reckoning those late
stragglers after the bourgeoisie—the NEPmen. The usual practice
was to impose on them ever-increasing and finally totally intoler-
able taxes. At a certain point they could no longer pay; they were
immediately arrested for bankruptcy, and their property was con-
fiscated. (Small tradesmen such as barbers, tailors, even those
who repaired primus stoves, were only deprived of their licenses
to ply their trade.)

There was an economic purpose to the development of the
NEPmen wave. The state needed property and gold, and there
was as yet no Kolyma. The famous gold fever began at the end of
1929, only the fever gripped not those looking for gold but those
from whom it was being shaken loose. The particular feature of
this new, “gold” wave was that the GPU was not actually accus-
ing these rabbits of anything, and was perfectly willing not to
send them off to Gulag country, but wished only to take away
their gold by main force. So the prisons were packed, the inter-
rogators were worn to a frazzle, but the transit prisons, prisoner
transports, and camps received only relatively minor reinforce-
ments.

Who was arrested in the “gold” wave? All those who, at one
time or another, fifteen years before, had had a private “business,”
had been involved in retail trade, had earned wages at a craft,
and could have, according to the GPU’s deductions, hoarded gold.

The History of Our Sewage Disposal System | 53

But it so happened that they often had no gold. They had put
their money into real estate or securities, which had melted away
or been taken away in the Revolution, and nothing remained.
They had high hopes, of course, in arresting dental technicians,
jewelers, and watch repairmen. Through denunciations, one could
learn about gold in the most unexpected places: a veteran lathe
worker had somewhere gotten hold of, and held on to, sixty gold
five-ruble pieces from Tsarist times. The famous Siberian partisan
Muravyev had come to Odessa, bringing with him a small bag
full of gold. The Petersburg Tatar draymen all had gold hidden
away. Whether or not these things were so could be discovered
only inside prison walls. Nothing—neither proletarian origin nor
revolutionary services—served as a defense against a gold de-
nunciation. All were arrested, all were crammed into GPU cells
in numbers no one had considered possible up to then—but that
was all to the good: they would cough it up all the sooner! It
even reached a point of such confusion that men and women were
imprisoned in the same cells and used the latrine bucket in each
other’s presence—who cared about those niceties? Give up your
gold, vipers! The interrogators did not write up charge sheets be-
cause no one needed their papers. And whether or not a sentence
would be pasted on was of very little interest. Only one thing
was important: Give up your gold, viper! The state needs gold
and you don’t. The interrogators had neither voice nor strength
left to threaten and torture; they had one universal method: feed
the prisoners nothing but salty food and give them no water.
Whoever coughed up gold got water! One gold piece for a cup
of fresh water!

People perish for cold metal.

This wave was distinguished from those that preceded and
followed it because, even though fewer than half-its victims held
their fate in their own hands, some did. If you in fact had no
gold, then your situation was hopeless. You would be beaten,
burned, tortured, and steamed to the point of death or until they
finally came to believe you. But if you had gold, you could deter-
mine the extent of your torture, the limits of your endurance,
and your own fate. Psychologically, this situation was, inciden-
tally, not easier but more difficult, because if you made an error

54 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

you would always be ridden by a guilty conscience. Of course,
anyone who had already mastered the rules of the institution
would yield and give up his gold—that was easier. But it was a
mistake to give it up too readily. They would refuse to believe
you had coughed it all up, and they would continue to hold you.
But you’d be wrong, too, to wait too long before yielding: you’d
end up kicking the bucket or they’d paste a term on you out of
meanness. One of the Tatar draymen endured all the tortures: he
had no gold! They imprisoned his wife, too, and tortured her, but
the Tatar stuck to his story: no gold! Then they arrested his
daughter: the Tatar couldn’t take it any more. He coughed up
100,000 rubles. At this point they let his family go, but slapped
a prison term on him. The crudest detective stories and operas
about brigands were played out in real life on a vast national scale.

The introduction of the passport system on the threshold of
the thirties also provided the camps with a good-sized draft of
reinforcements. Just as Peter I simplified the social structure,
sweeping clean all the nooks and crannies of the old Russian
class system, so our socialist passport system swept out, in
particular, the betwixt-and-between insects. It hit at the clever,
homeless portion of the population which wasn’t tied down to
anything. In the early stages, people made many mistakes with
those passports—and those not registered at their places of resi-
dence, and those not registered as having left their former places of
residence, were raked into the Archipelago, if only for a single
year.

And so the waves foamed and rolled. But over them all, in
1929-1930, billowed and gushed the multimillion wave of dis-
possessed kulaks. It was immeasurably large and it could cer-
tainly not have been housed in even the highly developed net-
work of Soviet interrogation prisons (which in any case were
packed full by the “gold” wave). Instead, it bypassed the prisons,
going directly to the transit prisons and camps, onto prisoner
transports, into the Gulag country. In sheer size this nonrecurring
tidal wave (it was an ocean) swelled beyond the bounds of any-
thing the penal system of even an immense state can permit itself.
There was nothing to be compared with it in all Russian history.
It was the forced resettlement of a whole people, an ethnic
catastrophe. But yet so cleverly were the channels of the GPU-

The History of Our Sewage Disposal System | 55

Gulag organized that the cities would have noticed nothing had
they not been stricken by a strange three-year famine—a famine
that came about without drought and without war.

This wave was also distinct from all those which preceded it
because no one fussed about with taking the head of the family
first and then working out what to do with the rest of the family.
On the contrary, in this wave they burned out whole nests, whole
families, from the start; and they watched jealously to be sure
that none of the children—fourteen, ten, even six years old—
got away: to the last scrapings, all had to go down the same
road, to the same common destruction. (This was the first such
experiment—at least in modern history. It was subsequently re-
peated by Hitler with the Jews, and again by Stalin with nation-
alities which were disloyal to him or suspected by him.)

This wave included only pathetically few of those kulaks for
whom it was named, in order to draw the wool over people’s eyes.
In Russian a kulak is a miserly, dishonest rural trader who grows
rich not by his own labor but through someone else’s, through
usury and operating as a middleman. In every locality even before
the Revolution such kulaks could be numbered on one’s fingers.
And the Revolution totally destroyed their basis of activity. Sub-
sequently, after 1917, by a transfer of meaning, the name kulak
began to be applied (in official and propaganda literature, whence
it moved into general usage) to all those who in any way hired
workers, even if it was only when they were temporarily short of
working hands in their own families. But we must keep in mind
that after the Revolution it was impossible to pay less than a fair
wage for all such labor—the Committees of the Poor and the vil-
lage soviets looked after the interests of landless laborers. Just let
somebody try to swindle a landless laborer! To this very day, in
fact, the hiring of labor at a fair wage is permitted in the Soviet
Union.

But the inflation of this scathing term kulak proceeded relent-
lessly, and by 1930 all strong peasants in general were being so
called—all peasants strong in management, strong in work, or
even strong merely in convictions. The term kulak was used to
smash the strength of the peasantry. Let us remember, let us open
our eyes: only a dozen years had passed since the great Decree on
the Land—that very decree without which the peasants would

56 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

have refused to follow the Bolsheviks and without which the
October Revolution would have failed. The land was allocated in
accordance with the number of “mouths” per family, equally. It
had been only nine years since the men of the peasantry had
returned from the Red Army and rushed onto the land they had
wrested for themselves. Then suddenly there were kulaks and
there were poor peasants. How could that be? Sometimes it was
the result of differences in initial stock and equipment; sometimes
it may have resulted from luck in the mixture of the family. But
wasn’t it most often a matter of hard work and persistence? And
now these peasants, whose breadgrain had fed Russia in 1928,
were hastily uprooted by local good-for-nothings and city people
sent in from outside. Like raging beasts, abandoning every con-
cept of “humanity,” abandoning all humane principles which had
evolved through the millennia, they began to round up the very
best farmers and their families, and to drive them, stripped of.their
possessions, naked, into the northern wastes, into the tundra and
the taiga.

Such a mass movement could not help but develop subsequent
ramifications. It became necessary to rid the villages also of those
peasants who had merely manifested an aversion to joining the
collective farms, or an absence of inclination for the collective
life, which they had never seen with their own eyes, about which
they knew nothing, and which they suspected (we now know how
well founded their suspicions were) would mean a life of forced
labor and famine under the leadership of loafers. Then it was also
necessary to get rid of those peasants, some of them not at all
prosperous, who, because of their daring, their physical strength,
their determination, their outspokenness at meetings, and their
love of justice, were favorites with their fellow villagers and by
virtue of their independence were therefore dangerous to the
leadership of the collective farm.” Beyond this, in every village
there were people who in one way or another had personally got-
ten in the way of the local activists. This was the perfect time to
settle accounts with them of jealousy, envy, insult. A new word
was needed for all these new victims as a class—and it was born.
By this time it had no “social” or “economic” content whatsoever,
but it had a marvelous sound: podkulachnik—“a person aiding

25. This kind of peasant and his fate were portrayed immortally in the
character of Stepan Chausov in S. Zalygin’s novel.

The History of Our Sewage Disposal System | 57

the kulaks.” In other words, I consider you an accomplice of the
enemy. And that finishes you! The most tattered landless laborer
in the countryside could quite easily be labeled a podkulachnik.”®

And so it was that these two terms embraced everything that
constituted the essence of the village, its energy, its keenness of
wit, its love of hard work, its resistance, and its conscience. They
were torn up by the roots—and collectivization was accom-
plished.

But new waves rolled from the collectivized villages: one of
them was a wave of agricultural wreckers. Everywhere they
began to discover wrecker agronomists who up until that year
had worked honestly all their lives but who now purposely sowed
weeds in Russian fields (on the instructions, of course, of the
Moscow institute, which had now been totally exposed; indeed,
there were those same 200,000 unarrested members of the Work-
ing Peasants Party, the TKP!). Certain agronomists failed to put
into effect the profound instructions of Lysenko—and in one
such wave, in 1931, Lorkh, the so-called “king” of the potato,
was sent to Kazakhstan. Others carried out the Lysenko directives
too precisely and thus exposed their absurdity. (In 1934 Pskov
agronomists sowed flax on the snow—exactly as Lysenko had
ordered. The seeds swelled up, grew moldy, and died. The big
fields lay empty for a year. Lysenko could not say that the snow
was a kulak or that he himself was an ass. He accused the
agronomists of being kulaks and of distorting his technology.
And the agronomists went off to Siberia.) Beyond all this, in
almost every Machine and Tractor Station wrecking in the
repairing of tractors was discovered—and that is how the failures
of the first collective farm years were explained!

There was a wave “for harvest losses” (losses in comparison
with the arbitrary harvest figures announced the preceding spring
by the “Commission for Determination of the Harvest”).

There was a wave “for failure to fulfill obligations undertaken
for delivery to the state of breadgrains”—the District Party Com-
mittee had undertaken the obligation, and the collective farm had
not fulfilled it: go to prison!

There was a wave for snipping ears, the nighttime snipping
of individual ears of grain in the field—a totally new type of

26. I remember very well that in our youth this term seemed quite logical;
there was nothing in the least unclear about it.

58 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

agricultural activity, a new type of harvesting! The wave of those
caught doing this was not small—it included many tens of
thousands of peasants, many of them not even adults but boys,
girls, and small children whose elders had sent them out at night
to snip, because they had no hope of receiving anything from the
collective farm for their daytime labor. For this bitter and not
very productive occupation (an extreme of poverty to which the
peasants had not been driven even in serfdom) the courts handed
out a full measure: ten years for what ranked as an especially
dangerous theft of socialist property under the notorious law of
August 7, 1932—which in prisoners’ lingo was known simply
as the law of Seven-eighths.

This law of “Seven-eighths” produced another big, separate
wave from the construction projects of the First and Second
Five-Year Plans, from transport, trade, and industry. Big thefts
were turned over to the NK VD. This wave must further be kept
in mind as one that kept on flowing steadily for the next fifteen
years, until 1947, especially during the war years. (Then in 1947
the original law was expanded and made more harsh. )

Now at last we can catch our breath! Now at last all the mass
waves are coming to an end! Comrade Molotov said on May 17,
1933: “We do not see our task as being mass repressions.”
Whew! At last! Begone, nighttime fears! But what’s that dog
howling out there? Go get ’em. Go get ‘em.

And here we are! The Kirov wave from Leningrad has begun.
While it lasted the tension was acknowledged to be so great that
special staffs of the NK VD were set up in each and every Dis-
trict Executive Committee of the city and an “accelerated”
judicial procedure was introduced. (Even earlier, it had not been
famous for being slow.) And there was no right of appeal.
(There had been no appeal earlier.) It is also believed that one-
quarter of Leningrad was purged—cleaned out—in 1934-1935.
Let this estimate be disproved by those who have the exact
Statistics and are willing to publish them. (To be sure, this wave
took in much more than Leningrad alone. It had a substantial
impact on the rest of the country in a form that was consistent
though chaotic: the firing from the civil service of all those
still left there whose fathers had been priests, all former noble-
women, and all persons having relatives abroad. )

Among such lashing waves as this, certain modest, changeless

The History of Our Sewage Disposal System | 59

wavelets always got lost; they were little heard of, but they, too,
kept flowing on and on:

e There were Schutzbiindlers who had lost the class battles
in Vienna and had come to the Fatherland of the world pro-
letariat for refuge.

e There were Esperantists—a harmful group which Stalin
undertook to smoke out during the years when Hitler was
doing the same thing.

e There were the unliquidated remnants of the Free Philo-
sophic Society—illegal philosophical circles.

e There were teachers who disagreed with the advanced
laboratory-team system of instruction. (In 1933, for instance,
Natalya Ivanovna Bugayenko was arrested by the Rostov GPU
—but in the third month of her interrogation, a government
decree suddenly announced that the system was a faulty one.
And she was let go.)

e There were employees of the Political Red Cross, which,
through the efforts of Yekaterina Peshkova, was still defending
its existence.

e There were mountain tribes of the North Caucasus who
were arrested for their 1935 revolt. And non-Russian nationali-
ties kept rolling in from one area, then another. (On the
Volga Canal construction site newspapers were published in
four national languages: Tatar, Turkish, Uzbek, and Kazakh.
And, of course, there were readers to read them! )

e There were once again believers, who this time were
unwilling to work on Sundays. (They had introduced the five-
and the six-day week.) And there were collective farmers sent
up for sabotage because they refused to work on religious feast
days, as had been their custom in the era of individual farms.

e And, always, there were those who refused to become
NKVD informers. (Among them were priests who refused to
violate the secrecy of the confessional, for the Organs had very
quickly discovered how useful it was to learn the content of
confessions—the only use they found for religion.)

e And members of non-Orthodox sects were arrested on an
ever-wider scale.

e And the Big Solitaire game with the socialists went on
and on.

60 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

And last of all there was a category I have not yet named, a
wave that was continually flowing: Section 10, also known as KRA
(Counter-Revolutionary Agitation) and also known as ASA
(Anti-Soviet Agitation). The wave of Section 10 was perhaps
the most constant of all. It never stopped, and whenever there
was another big wave, as, for instance, in 1937, 1945, and 1949,
its waters became particularly swollen.’

Paradoxically enough, every act of the all-penetrating, eternally
wakeful Organs, over a span of many years, was based solely on
one article of the 140 articles of the nongeneral division of the
Criminal Code of 1926. One can find more epithets in praise of
this article than Turgenev once assembled to praise the Russian
language, or Nekrasov to praise Mother Russia: great, powerful,
abundant, highly ramified, multiform, wide-sweeping 58, which
summed up the world not so much through the exact terms of its
sections as in their extended dialectical interpretation.

Who among us has not experienced its all-encompassing em-
brace? In all truth, there is no step, thought, action, or lack of
action under the heavens which could not be punished by the
"heavy hand of Article 58.

The article itself could not be worded in such broad terms,
but it proved possible to interpret it this broadly.

Article 58 was not in that division of the Code dealing with
political crimes; and nowhere was it categorized as “political.”
No. It was included, with crimes against public order and
organized gangsterism, in a division of “crimes against the state.”
Thus the Criminal Code starts off by refusing to recognize any-
one under its jurisdiction as a political offender. All are simply
criminals.

Article 58 consisted of fourteen sections.

In Section 1 we learn that any action (and, according to

27. This particular unremitting wave grabbed up anyone at all at any
moment. But when it came to outstanding intellectuals in the thirties, they
sometimes considered it cleverer to fabricate a case based on some conspicu-
ously shameful violation (like pederasty; or, in the case of Professor Pletnev,
the allegation that, left alone with a woman patient, he bit her breast. A national
newspaper reports such an incident—and just try to deny it!).

The History of Our Sewage Disposal System | 61

Article 6 of the Criminal Code, any absence of action) directed
toward the weakening of state power was considered to be
counterrevolutionary. _

Broadly interpreted, this turned out to include the refusal of
a prisoner in camp to work when in a state of starvation and
exhaustion. This was a weakening of state power. And it was
punished by execution. (The execution of malingerers during
the war.)

From 1934 on, when we were given back the term Mother-
land, subsections were inserted on treason to the Motherland—
la, 1b, 1c, 1d. According to these subsections, all actions directed
against the military might of the U.S.S.R. were punishable by
execution (1b), or by ten years’ imprisonment (1a), but the
lighter penalty was imposed only when mitigating circumstances
were present and upon civilians only.

Broadly interpreted: when our soldiers were sentenced to
only ten years for allowing themselves to be taken prisoner
(action injurious to Soviet military might), this was humani-
tarian to the point of being illegal. According to the Stalinist
code, they should all have been shot on their return home.

(Here is another example of broad interpretation. I remem-
ber well an encounter in the Butyrki in the summer of 1946.
A certain Pole had been born in Lemberg when that city was
part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Until World War IT he
lived in his native city, by then located in Poland; then he
went to Austria, where he entered the service, and in 1945 he
was arrested there by the Russians. Since by this time Austrian
Lemberg had become Ukrainian Lvov, he received a tenner
under Article 54-la of the Ukrainian Criminal Code: i.e., for
treason to his motherland, the Ukraine! And at his interroga-
tion the poor fellow couldn’t prove that treason to the Ukraine
had not been his purpose when he went to Vienna! And that’s
how he conned his way into becoming a traitor.)

One important additional broadening of the section on
treason was its application “via Article 19 of the Criminal
Code”—“via intent.” In other words, no treason had taken
place; but the interrogator envisioned an intention to betray—
and that was enough to justify a full term, the same as for
actual treason. True, Article 19 proposes that there be no

62 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

penalty for intent, but only for preparation, but given a
dialectical reading one can understand intention as prepara-
tion. And “preparation is punished in the same way [i.e., with
the same penalty] as the crime itself’ (Criminal Code). In
general, “we draw no distinction between intention and the
crime itself, and this is an instance of the superiority of Soviet
legislation to bourgeois legislation.””*
_ Section 2 listed armed rebellion, seizure of power in the capital
or in the provinces, especially for the purpose of severing any
part of the U.S.S.R. through the use of force. For this the
penalties ranged up to and included execution (as in every
succeeding section).

This was expanded to mean something which could not be
explicitly stated in the article itself but which revolutionary
sense of justice could be counted on to suggest: it applied to
every attempt of any national republic to act upon its right to
leave the U.S.S.R. After all, the word “force” is not defined
in terms of whom it applies to. Even when the entire popula-
tion of a republic wants to secede, if Moscow is opposed, the
attempted secession will be forcible. Thus, all Estonian,
Latvian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Turkestan nationalists
very easily received their tens and their twenty-fives under this
section.

Section 3 was “assisting in any way or by any means a foreign
state at war with the U.S.S.R.”

This section made it possible to condemn any citizen who
had been in occupied territory—whether he had nailed on the
heel of a German soldier’s shoe or sold him a bunch of radishes.
And it could be applied to any citizeness who had helped lift
the fighting spirit of an enemy soldier by dancing and spending
the night with him. Not everyone was actually sentenced under
this section—because of the huge numbers who had been in
occupied territory. But everyone who had been in occupied
territory could have been sentenced under it.

Section 4 spoke about (fantastic!) aid to the international
bourgeoisie.

28. A. Y. Vyshinsky (editor), Ot Tyurem k Vospitatelnym Uchrezhdeniyam
(From Prisons to Rehabilitative Institutions), a collection of articles published

_ by the Criminal! Policy Institute, Moscow, Sovetskoye Zakonodatelstvo Pub-

lishing House, 1934,

The History of Our Sewage Disposal System | 63

To whom, one wonders, could this possibly refer? And yet,
broadly interpreted, and with the help of a revolutionary con-
science, it was easy to find categories: All émigrés who had left
the country before 1920, i.e., several years before the Code
was even written, and whom our armies came upon in Europe
a quarter-century later—in 1944 and 1945—received 58-4:
ten years or execution. What could they have been doing
abroad other than aiding the international bourgeoisie? (In
the example of the young people’s musical society already
cited, we have seen that the international bourgeoisie could
also be aided from inside the U.S.S.R.) They were, in addition,
aided by all SR’s, all Mensheviks (the section was drafted
with them in mind), and, subsequently, by the engineers of the
State Planning Commission and the Supreme Council of the
Economy.

Section 5 was inciting a foreign state to declare war against
the U.S.S.R.

A chance was missed to apply this section against Stalin
and his diplomatic and military circle in 1940—1941. Their
blindness and insanity led to just that. Who if not they drove
Russia into shameful, unheard-of defeats, incomparably worse
than the defeats of Tsarist Russia in 1904 or 1915? Defeats
such as Russia had never known since the thirteenth century.

Section 6 was espionage.

This section was interpreted so broadly that if one were to
count up all those sentenced under it one might conclude that
during Stalin’s time our people supported life not by agriculture
or industry, but only by espionage on behalf of foreigners,
and by living on subsidies from foreign intelligence services.
Espionage was very convenient in its simplicity, compre-
hensible both to an undeveloped criminal and to a learned
jurist, to a journalist and to public opinion.”®

The breadth of interpretation of Section 6 lay further in

29. And very likely spy mania was not merely the narrow-minded predilec-
tion of Stalin alone. It was very useful for everyone who possessed any priv-
ileges. It became the natural justification for increasingly widespread secrecy,
the withholding of information, closed doors and security passes, fenced-off
dachas and secret, restricted special shops. People had no way of penetrating
the armor plate of spy mania and learning how the bureaucracy made its cozy
arrangements, loafed, blundered, ate, and took its amusements.

64 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

the fact that people were sentenced not only for actual

espionage but also for:

PSh—Suspicion of Espionage—or NSh—Unproven Espionage
—for which they gave the whole works.

And even SVPSh—Contacts Leading to (!) Suspicion of
Espionage.

In other words, let us say that an acquaintance of an ac-
quaintance of your wife had a dress made by the same seam-
stress (who was, of course, an NKVD agent) used by the
wife of a foreign diplomat.

These 58-6 PSh’s and SVPSh’s were sticky sections. They re-
quired the strict confinement and incessant supervision of those
convicted (for, after all, an intelligence service might reach
out its tentacles to its protégé even in a camp); also, such
prisoners could be moved only under convoy—armed escort. In
general, all the lettered articles—which were, in fact, not articles
of the Code at all but frightening combinations of capital letters
(and we shall encounter more of them in this chapter )—always
contained a touch of the enigmatic, always remained incompre-
hensible, and it wasn’t at all clear whether they were offshoots
of Article 58 or independent and extremely dangerous. In many
camps prisoners convicted under the provisions of these lettered
articles were subjected to restrictions even more stringent than
those of the ordinary 58’s.

Section 7 applied to subversion of industry, transport, trade,
and the circulation of money.

In the thirties, extensive use was made of this section to
catch masses of people—under the simplified and widely under-
stood catchword wrecking. In reality, everything enumerated
under Section 7 was very obviously and plainly being sub-
verted daily. So didn’t someone have to be guilty of it all?
For centuries the people had built and created, always honor-
ably, always honestly, even for serf-owners and nobles. Yet
no one, from the days of Ryurik on, had ever heard of wreck-
ing. But now, when for the first time all the wealth had come
to belong to the people, hundreds of thousands of the best
sons of the people inexplicably rushed off to wreck. (Section 7
did not provide for wrecking in agriculture, but since it was
impossible otherwise to explain rationally how and why the
fields were choked with weeds, why harvests were falling off,

The History of Our Sewage Disposal System | 65

why machines were breaking down, then dialectic sensitivity

brought agriculture, too, under its sway.)

Section 8 covered terror (not that terror from above for which
the Soviet Criminal Code was supposed to “provide a founda-
tion and basis in legality,”*° but terrorism from below).

Terror was construed in a very broad sense, not simply a
matter of putting bombs under governors’ carriages, but, for —
example, smashing in the face of a personal enemy if he was
an activist in the Party, the Komsomol, or the police/—that
was already terror. The murder of an activist, especially, was
always treated more seriously than the murder of an ordinary
person (as in the Code of Hammurabi in the eighteenth century
B.C.). If a husband killed his wife’s lover, it was very fortunate
for him if the victim turned out not to be a Party member; he
would be sentenced under Article 136 as a common criminal,
who was a “social ally” and didn’t require an armed escort. But
if the lover turned out to have been a Party member, the
husband became an enemy of the people, with a 58-8 sentence.

An even more important extension of the concept was at-
tained by interpreting Section 8 in terms of that same Article
19, i.e., intent in the sense of preparation, to include not only
a direct threat against an activist uttered near a beer hall
(“Just you wait!”) but also the quick-tempered retort of a
peasant woman at the market (“Oh, drop dead!”). Both
qualified as TN—Terrorist Intent—and provided a basis for
applying the article in all its severity.’

Section 9 concerned destruction or damage by explosion or
arson (always with a counterrevolutionary purpose), for which
the abbreviated term was “diversion”—in other words, sabotage.

The expansion of this section was based on the fact that the
counterrevolutionary purpose could be discerned by the inter-
rogator, who knew best what was going on in the criminal’s
mind. And every human error, failure, mistake at work or in
the production process, remained unforgiven, and was there-
fore considered to be a case of “diversion.”

But there was no section in Article 58 which was interpreted
as broadly and with so ardent a revolutionary conscience as

30. Lenin, fifth edition, Vol. 45, p. 190.
31. This sounds like an exaggeration, a farce, but it was not I who invented
that farce. I was in prison with these individuals,

66 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

Section 10. Its definition was: “Propaganda or agitation, con-
taining an appeal for the overthrow, subverting, or weakening
of the Soviet power . . . and, equally, the dissemination or prep-
aration or possession of literary materials of similar content.”
For this section in peacetime a minimum penalty only was set
(not any less! not too light!); no upper limit was set for the
maximum penalty.

Such was the fearlessness of the great Power when confronted
by the word of a subject.

The famous extensions of this famous section were as
follows: The scope of “agitation containing an appeal” was
enlarged to include a face-to-face conversation between friends
or even between husband and wife, or a private letter. The
word “appeal” could mean personal advice. And we say “could
mean” because, in fact, it did.

“Subverting and weakening” the government could include
any idea which did not coincide with or rise to the level of
intensity of the ideas expressed in the newspaper on any par-
ticular day. After all, anything which does not strengthen must
weaken: Indeed, anything which does not completely fit in,
coincide, subverts!

And he who sings not with us today
is against
us!
—MaAyYAKOVSKY

The term “preparation of literary materials” covered every
letter, note, or private diary, even when only the original
document existed. |

Thus happily expanded, what thought was there, whether
merely in the mind, spoken aloud, or jotted down, which was
not covered by Section 10?

Section 11 was a special one; it had no independent content of
its own, but provided for an aggravating factor in any of the
preceding ones: if the action was undertaken by an organization
or if the criminal joined an’organization.

In actual practice, the section was so broadened that no
organization whatever was required. I myself experienced the
subtle application of this section. Two of us had secretly ex-

The History of Our Sewage Disposal System | 67

changed thoughts—in other words we were the beginnings of
an organization, in other words an organization!

Section 12 concerned itself closely with the conscience of our
citizens: it dealt with the failure to make a denunciation of any
action of the types listed. And the penalty for the mortal sin of
failure to make a denunciation carried no maximum limit!

This section was in itself such a fantastic extension of
everything else that no further extension was needed. He knew
and he did not tell became the equivalent of “He did it himself”!
Section 13, presumably long since out of date, had to do with

service in the Tsarist secret police—the Okhrana.** (A subse-
quent form of analogous service was, on the contrary, considered
patriotic. )

Section 14 stipulated the penalties for “conscious failure to
carry out defined duties or intentionally careless execution of
same.” In brief this was called “sabotage” or “economic counter-
revolution”—and the penalties, of course, included execution.

It was only the interrogator who, after consulting his revolu-
tionary sense of justice, could separate what was intentional
from what was unintentional. This section was applied to
peasants who failed to come across with food deliveries. It
was also applied to collective farmers who failed to work the
required minimum number of “labor days”; to camp prisoners
who failed to complete their work norms; and, in a peculiar
ricochet, after the war it came to be applied to members of
Russia’s organized underworld of thieves, the blatnye or blatari,
for escaping from camp. In other words, by an extension, a
thief’s flight from camp was interpreted as subversion of the
camp system rather than as a dash to freedom.

Such was the last rib of the fan of Article 58—a fan whose
spread encompassed all human existence.

Now that we have completed our review of this great Article
of the Criminal Code, we are less likely to be astounded further
on. Wherever the law is, crime can be found. |

32. There are psychological bases for suspecting I. Stalin of having been
liable under this section of Article 58 also. By no means all the documents relat-
ing to this type of service survived February, 1917, to become matters of
public knowledge. V. F. Dzhunkovsky a former Tsarist police director, who
died in the Kolyma, declared that the hasty burning of police archives in the

first days of the February Revolution was a joint effort on the part of certain
self-interested revolutionaries.

68 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

The damascene steel of Article 58, first tried out in 1927, right
after it was forged, was wetted by all the waves of the following
decade, and with whistle and slash was used to the full to deal
telling blows in the law’s attack upon the people in 1937-1938.

Here one has to make the point that the 1937 operation was
not arbitrary or accidental, but well planned well ahead of time,
and that in the first half of that year many Soviet prisons were
re-equipped. Cots were taken out of the cells and continuous one-
or two-storied board benches or bunks were built. Old prisoners
claim to remember that the first blow allegedly took the form of
mass arrests, striking virtually throughout the whole country
on one single August night. (But, knowing our clumsiness, I don’t
really believe this.) In that autumn, when people were trustingly
expecting a big, nationwide amnesty on the twentieth anniversary
of the October Revolution, Stalin, the prankster, added unheard-
of fifteen- and twenty-year prison terms to the Criminal Code.**

There is hardly any neéd to repeat here what has already been
widely written, and will be written many times more, about 1937:
that a crushing blow was dealt the upper ranks of the Party, the
government, the military command, and the GPU-NKVD itself.*°
There was hardly one province of the Soviet Union in which the
first secretary of the Party Committee or the Chairman of the
Provincial Executive Committee survived. Stalin picked more
suitable people for his purposes.

Olga Chavchavadze tells how it was in Tbilisi. In 1938 the
Chairman of the City Executive Committee, his first deputy, de-
partment chiefs, their assistants, all the chief accountants, all the
chief economists were arrested. New ones were appointed in their
places. Two months passed, and the arrests began again: the

33. It was similarly not by chance that the “Big House” in Leningrad was
finished in 1934, just in time for Kirov’s asassination.

34. The twenty-five-year term was added for the thirtieth anniversary of the
Revolution in 1947.

35. These days, as we observe the Chinese Cultural Revolution at the same
stage—in the seventeenth year after its final victory—we can begin to consider
it very likely that there exists a fundamental law of historical development.
And even Stalin himself begins to seem only a blind and perfunctory executive
agent.

The History of Our Sewage Disposal System | 69

chairman, the deputy, all eleven department chiefs, all the chief
accountants, all the chief economists. The only people left at
liberty were ordinary accountants, stenographers, charwomen,
and messengers... .

In the arrest of rank-and-file members of the Party there was
evidently a hidden theme not directly stated anywhere in the
indictments and verdicts: that arrests should be carried out
predominantly among Party members who had joined before
1924. This was pursued with particular rigor in Leningrad, be-
cause all of them there had signed the “platform” of the New
Opposition. (And how could they have refused to sign? How
could they have refused to “trust” their Leningrad Provincial
Party Committee?)

Here is one vignette from those years as it actually occurred.
A district Party conference was under way in Moscow Province.
It was presided over by a new secretary of the District Party
Committee, replacing one recently arrested. At the conclusion
of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for.
Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to
his feet during the conference at every mention of his name).
The small hall echoed with “stormy applause, rising to an ova-
tion.” For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the “stormy
applause, rising to an ovation,” continued. But palms were getting
sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people
were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly
even to those who really adored Stalin. However, who would
dare be the first to stop? The secretary of the District Party
Committee could have done it. He was standing on the platform,
and it was he who had just called for the ovation. But he was a
newcomer. He had taken the place of a man who’d been arrested.
He was afraid! After all, NKVD men were standing in the hall
applauding and watching to see who quit first! And in that ob-
scure, small hall, unknown to the Leader, the applause went on
—six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose
was cooked! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with
heart attacks! At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they
could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously,
not so eagerly—but up there with the presidium where everyone
could see them? The director of the local paper factory, an

70 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

independent and strong-minded man, stood with the presidium. ~
Aware of all the falsity and all the impossibility of the situation,
he still kept on applauding! Nine minutes! Ten! In anguish he
watched the secretary of the District Party Committee, but the
latter dared not stop. Insanity! To the last man! With make-
believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with
faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on
applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried
out of the hall on stretchers! And even then those who were left
would not falter. .. . Then, after eleven minutes, the director of
the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat
down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the
universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man,
everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved!
The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving
wheel.

That, however, was how they discovered who the independent
people were. And that was how they went about eliminating
them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They
easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite
different. But after he had signed Form 206, the final document
of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him:

“Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!”**

‘(And just what are we supposed to do? How are we supposed
to stop?)

Now that’s what Darwin’s natural selection is. And that’s also
how to grind people down with stupidity.

But today a new myth is being created. Every story of 1937
that is printed, every reminiscence that is published, relates with-
out exception the tragedy of the Communist leaders. They have
kept on assuring us, and we have unwittingly fallen for it, that
the history of 1937 and 1938 consisted chiefly of the arrests of
the big Communists—and virtually no one else. But out of the
millions arrested at that time, important Party and state officials
could not possibly have represented more than 10 percent. Most
of the relatives standing in line with food parcels outside the
Leningrad prisons were lower-class women, the sort who sold

36. Told me by N. G ko.

The History of Our Sewage Disposal System | 71

The composition of the hordes who were arrested in that
powerful wave and lugged off, half-dead, to the Archipelago was
of such fantastic diversity that anyone who wants to deduce the
rationale for it scientifically will rack his brain a long time for
the answer. (To the contemporaries of the purge it was still more
incomprehensible. )

The real law underlying the arrests of those years was the
assignment of quotas, the norms set, the planned allocations.
Every city, every district, every military unit was assigned a
specific quota of arrests to be carried out by a stipulated time.
From then on everything else depended on the ingenuity of the
Security operations personnel.

The former Chekist Aleksandr Kalganov recalls that a tele-
gram arrived in Tashkent: “Send 200!” They had just finished
one clean-out, and it seemed as if there was “no one else” to take.
Well, true, they had just brought in about fifty more from the
districts. And then they had an idea! They would reclassify as
58’s all the nonpolitical offenders being held by the police. No
sooner said than done. But despite that, they had still not filled the
quota. At that precise moment the police reported that a gypsy
band had impudently encamped on one of the city squares and
asked what to do with them. Someone had another bright idea!
They surrounded the encampment and raked in all the gypsy
men from seventeen to sixty as 58’s! They had fulfilled the plan!

This could happen another way as well: according to Chief of
Police Zabolovsky, the Chekists of Ossetia were given a quota
of five hundred to be shot in the Republic. They asked to have
it increased, and they were permitted another 250.

Telegrams transmitting instructions of this kind were sent via
ordinary channels in a very rudimentary code. In Temryuk the
woman telegrapher, in holy innocence, transmitted to the NK VD
switchboard the message that 240 boxes of soap were to be
shipped to Krasnodar the following day. In the morning she
learned about a big wave of arrests and guessed the meaning of
the message! She told her girl friend what kind of telegram it
was—and was promptly arrested herself.

(Was it indeed totally by chance that the code words for
human beings were a box of soap? Or were they familiar with
soap-making? )

72 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

Of course, certain patterns could be discerned.

Among those arrested were:

Our own real spies abroad. (These were often the most dedi-
cated Comintern workers and Chekists, and among them were
many attractive women. They were called back to the Mother-
land and arrested at the border. They were then confronted with
their former Comintern chief, for example, Mirov-Korona, who
confirmed that he himself had been working for one of the
foreign intelligence services—which meant that his subordinates
were automatically guilty too. And the more dedicated they
were, the worse it was for them.)

Soviet employees of the Chinese Eastern Railroad, the
KVZhD, were one and all arrested as Japanese spies, including
their wives, children, and grandmothers. But we have to admit
these arrests had already begun several years earlier.

Koreans from the Far East were sent into exile in Kazakhstan
—the first experiment in mass arrests on the basis of race.

Leningrad Estonians were all arrested on the strength of
having Estonian family names and charged with being anti-
Communist Estonian spies.

All Latvian Riflemen and all Latvian Chekists were arrested.
Yes, indeed, those very Latvians who had been the midwives of
the Revolution, who just a short while before had constituted
the nucleus and the pride of the Cheka! And with them were
taken even those Communists of bourgeois Latvia who had been
exchanged in 1921—and been freed thereby from their dreadful
Latvian prison terms of two and three years. (In Leningrad, the
Latvian Department of the Herzen Institute, the House of Latvian
Culture, the Estonian Club, the Latvian Technicum, and the
Latvian and Estonian newspapers were all closed down.)

In the midst of the general to-do, the Big Solitaire game was
finally wound up. All those not yet taken were raked in. There
was no longer any reason to keep it secret. The time had come
to write “finis” to the whole game. So now the socialists were
taken off to prison in whole “exiles” (for example, the Ufa “exile”
and the Saratov “exile”), and they were all sentenced together
and driven off in herds to the slaughterhouses of the Archipelago.

Nowhere was it specifically prescribed that more members
of the intelligentsia should be arrested than of other groups. But

The History of Our Sewage Disposal System | 73

just as the intelligentsia had never been overlooked in previous
waves, it was not neglected in this one. A student’s denunciation
(and this combination of words, “student” and “denunciation,”
had ceased to sound outlandish) that a certain lecturer in a higher
educational institution kept citing Lenin and Marx frequently but
Stalin not at all was all that was needed for the lecturer not to
show up for lectures any more. And what if he cited no one? All
Leningrad Orientalists of the middle and younger generation were
arrested. The entire staff of the Institute of the North, except
for its NKVD informers, was arrested. They even went after
schoolteachers. In Sverdlovsk one case involved thirty secondary
schoolteachers and the head of the Provincial Education De-
partment, Perel.*” One of the terrible accusations against them
was that they had made arrangements to have a New Year’s tree
in order to burn down the school. And the club fell with the
regularity of a pendulum on the heads of the engineers—who by
this time were no longer “bourgeois” but a whole Soviet genera-
tion of engineers.

Because of an irregularity in the geological strata two mine
tunnels which mine surveyor Nikolai Merkuryevich Mikov had
calculated would meet failed to do so. He got Article 58-7—
twenty years. |

Six geologists (the Kotovich group) were sentenced to ten
years under 58-7 “for intentionally concealing reserves of tin
ore in underground sites in anticipation of the arrival of the
Germans.” (In other words, they had failed to find the deposits.)

On the heels of the main waves followed an additional, special
wave—of wives and the so-called “ChS” (Members of Families).
Among them were the wives of important Party leaders and also,
in certain places, Leningrad, for example, the wives of all those
who had been sentenced to “ten years without the right to cor-
respond”—in other words, those who were no longer among the
living. The “ChS,” as a rule, all got eights—eight years. (Well,

37. Five of them died before trial from tortures suffered during interrogation.
Twenty-four died in camps. The thirtieth, Ivan Aristaulovich Punich, returned
after his release and rehabilitation. (Had he died, we would have known
nothing about the thirty, just as we know nothing about millions of others.)
And the many “witnesses” who testified against them are still there in Sverd-
lovsk today—prospering, occupying responsible positions, or living on as
special pensioners. Darwinian selection!

74 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

that was still less than the dispossessed kulaks got and their
children did not go to the Archipelago.)

Piles of victims! Hills of victims! A frontal assault of the
NKVD on the city: In one wave, for example, G. P. Matveyeva
saw not only her husband but all three of her brothers arrested,
and all in different cases. (Of the four, three never returned. )

An electrician had a high-tension line break in his sector:
58-7—twenty years.

A Perm worker, Novikov, was accused of planning to blow
up a Kama River Bridge.

In that same city of Perm, Yuzhakov was arrested during
the day, and at night they came for his wife. They presented
her with a list of names and demanded that she sign a confession
that they had all met in her house at a Menshevik-SR meeting
(of course, they had not). They promised in return to let her
out to be with her three children. She signed, destroying all those
listed, and, of course, she herself remained in prison.

Nadezhda Yudenich was arrested because of her family name.
True, they established, after nine months, that she was not related
to the White general, and they let her out (a mere trifle: during
that time her mother had died of worry).

The film Lenin in October was shown in Staraya Russa. Some-
one present noticed the phrase in the film, “Palchinsky must
know!” Palchinsky was defending the Winter Palace. But we have
a nurse working here named Palchinskaya! Arrest her! They did
arrest her. And it turned out that she actually was his wife—
who had hidden in the provinces following his execution.

In 1930, as small boys, the three brothers Pavel, Ivan, and
Stepan Borushko came to the Soviet Union from Poland to live
with their parents. Now as young men they were arrested for
PSh—Suspicion of Espionage—and got ten years.

A streetcar motorwoman of Krasnodar was returning on foot
late at night from the car depot; on the outskirts of the city, to
her misfortune, she passed some people working to free a truck
that had gotten stuck. It turned out to be full of corpses—hands
and legs stuck out from beneath the canvas. They wrote down
her name and the next day she was arrested. The interrogator
asked her what she had seen. She told him truthfully. (Darwinian
selection!) Anti-Soviet Agitation—ten years.

A plumber turned off the loudspeaker in his room every time

The History of Our Sewage Disposal System | 75

the endless letters to Stalin were being read.** His next-door
neighbor denounced him. (Where, oh where, is that neighbor
today?) He got SOE—‘“Socially Dangerous Element”—eight
years.

A half-literate stovemaker used to enjoy writing his name in
his free time. This raised his self-esteem. There was no blank
paper around, so he wrote on newspapers. His neighbors found his
newspaper in the sack in the communal toilet, with pen-and-ink
flourishes across the countenance of the Father and Teacher.
Anti-Soviet Agitation—ten years.

Stalin and those close to him loved their portraits and splashed
them all over the newspapers and issued them in millions of
copies. The flies paid little heed to their sanctity, and it was a pity
not to make use of the paper—and how many unfortunates got
a term for that!

Arrests rolled through the streets and apartment houses like
an epidemic. Just as people transmit an epidemic infection from
one to another without knowing it, by such innocent means as a
handshake, a breath, handing someone something, so, too, they
passed on the infection of inevitable arrest by a handshake, by a
breath, by a chance meeting on the street. For if you are destined
to confess tomorrow that you organized an underground group
to poison the city’s water supply, and if today I shake hands with
you on the street, that means I, too, am doomed.

Seven years earlier the city had watched while they massacred
the countryside and considered it only natural. Now the country-
side might have watched them massacre the city, but the country-
side itself was too dark for that, and was still undergoing the
finishing touches of its own slaughter.

The surveyor (!) Saunin got fifteen years for . . . cattle plague
(!) in the district and for bad harvests (!) (and the entire leader-
ship of the district was shot for the same reason).

The secretary of a District Party Committee went into the
fields to speed up the plowing, and an old peasant asked him
whether he knew that for seven years the collective farmers had
received not one single ounce of grain in return for their “labor
days”—only straw and very little of that. For his question the
peasant got ASA—Anti-Soviet Agitation—ten years.

38. Who remembers them? They went on and on every day for hours!

Stupefyingly identical! Levitan, the announcer, probably remembers them well:
he used to read them in rolling tones, with great expression!

76 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

Another peasant, with six children, met a different fate. Be-
cause he had six mouths to feed he devoted himself whole-
heartedly to collective farm work, and kept hoping he would get
some return for his labor. And he did—they awarded him a deco-
ration. They awarded it at a special assembly, made speeches. In
his reply, the peasant got carried away. He said, “Now if I could
just have a sack of flour instead of this decoration! Couldn’t I
somehow?” A wolflike laugh rocketed through the hall, and the
newly decorated hero went off to exile, together with all six of
those dependent mouths.

Should we wrap it all up and simply say that they arrested the
innocent? But we omitted saying that the very concept of guilt
had been repealed by the proletarian revolution and, at the be- —
ginning of the thirties, was defined as rightist opportunism!*°
So we can’t even discuss these out-of-date concepts, guilt and
innocence.

The reverse wave of 1939 was an unheard-of incident in the
history of the Organs, a blot on their record! But, in fact, this
reverse wave was not large; it included about 1 to 2 percent of
those who had been arrested but not yet convicted, who had not
yet been sent away to far-off places and had not yet perished.
It was not large, but it was put to effective use. It was like giving
back one kopeck change from a ruble, but it was necessary in
order to heap all the blame on that dirty Yezhov, to strengthen the
newcomer, Beria, and to cause the Leader himself to shine more
brightly. With this kopeck they skillfully drove the ruble right
into the ground. After all, if “they had sorted things out and
freed some people” (and even the newspapers wrote intrepidly
about individual cases of persons who had been slandered), it
meant that the rest of those arrested were indeed scoundrels! And
those who returned kept silent. They had signed pledges not to
speak out. They were mute with terror. And there were very few
who knew even a little about the secrets of the Archipelago. The
distinction was as before: Black Marias at night and demonstra-
tions by day.

But for that matter they soon took that kopeck back—during

39. Vyshinsky, op. cit.

The History of Our Sewage Disposal System | 77

those same years and via those same sections of the boundless
Article 58. Well, who in 1940 noticed the wave of wives arrested
for failure to renounce their husbands? And who in Tambov re-
members that during that year of peace they arrested an entire
jazz orchestra playing at the “Modern” Cinema Theatre because
they all turned out to be enemies of the people? And who noticed
the thirty thousand Czechs who in 1939 fled from occupied
Czechoslovakia to their Slavic kinfolk in the U.S.S.R.? It was
impossible to guarantee that a single one of them was not a spy.
They sent them all off to northern camps. (And it was out of
those camps that the “Czechoslovak Corps” materialized during
the war.) And was it not, indeed, in 1939 that we reached out our
helping hands to the West Ukrainians and the West Byelorussians,
and, in 1940, to the Baltic states and to the Moldavians? It turned
out that our brothers badly needed to be purged, and from them,
too, flowed waves of social prophylaxis. They took those who
were too independent, too influential, along with those who were
too well-to-do, too intelligent, too noteworthy; they took, par-
ticularly, many Poles from former Polish provinces. (It was then
that ill-fated Katyn was filled up; and then, too, that in the north-
ern camps they stockpiled fodder for the future army of Sikorski
and Anders.) They arrested officers everywhere. Thus the
population was shaken up, forced into silence, and left with-
out any possible leaders of resistance. Thus it was that wisdom
was instilled, that former ties and former friendships were cut
off.

Finland ceded its isthmus to us with zero population. Never-
theless, the removal and resettlement of all persons with Finnish
blood took place throughout Soviet Karelia and in Leningrad in
1940. We didn’t notice that wavelet: we have no Finnish blood.

In the Finnish War we undertook our first experiment in con-
victing our war prisoners as traitors to the Motherland. The first
such experiment in human history; and would you believe it?—
we didn’t notice!

That was the rehearsal—just at that moment the war burst
upon us. And with it a massive retreat. It was essential to evacuate
swiftly everyone who could be got out of the western republics
that were being abandoned to the enemy. In the rush, entire mili-
tary units—regiments, antiaircraft and artillery batteries—were
left behind intact in Lithuania. But they still managed to get out

78 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

several thousand families of unreliable Lithuanians. (Four thou-
sand of them were subsequently turned over to be plundered by
thieves in camp at Krasnoyarsk.) From June 23 on, in Latvia and
Estonia, they speeded up the arrests. But the ground was burning
under them, and they were forced to leave even faster. They
forgot to take whole fortresses with them, like the one at Brest,
but they did not forget to shoot down political prisoners in the
cells and courtyards of Lvov, Rovno, Tallinn, and many other
Western prisons. In the Tartu Prison they shot 192 prisoners and
threw their corpses down a well.

How can one visualize it? You know nothing. The door of your
cell opens, and they shoot you. You cry out in your death agony,
and there is no one to hear your cries or tell of them except the
prison stones. They say, however, that there were some who
weren't successfully finished off, and we may someday read a
book about that too.

In the rear, the first wartime wave was for those spreading
rumors and panic. That was the language of a special decree, out-
side the Code, issued in the first days of the war.*° This was just a
trial bloodletting in order to maintain a general state of tension.
They gave everyone ten years for it, but it was not considered
part of Article 58, and therefore those few who survived the war-
time camps were amnestied in 1945.

Then there was a wave of those who failed to turn in radio
receivers or radio parts. For one radio tube found (as a result of
denunciation) they gave ten years. |

Then there was the wave of Germans—Germans living on the
Volga, colonists in the Ukraine and the North Caucasus, and all
Germans in general who lived anywhere in the Soviet Union. The
determining factor here was blood, and even heroes of the Civil
War and old members of the Party who were German were sent
off into exile.“

40. I myself almost felt the impact of that decree. I was standing in line at
the bread store, when a policeman called me out and took me off for the sake
of his score. If it had not been for a fortunate intervention, I might have started
out in Gulag right away instead of going off to war.

41. They judged blood by family name. The design engineer Vasily Okorokov
had found it inconvenient to sign his drawings with his real name. Consequently,
in the thirties, when it was still legally possible, he had changed his name to
Robert Shtekker. It was elegant, and he was able to work up a good-looking
professional signature with it. Now he was arrested as a German—and given

The History of Our Sewage Disposal System | 79

In essence, the exile of the Germans was similar to the dis-
possession of the kulaks. But it was less harsh, since the Germans
were allowed to take more of their possessions with them and
were not sent off to such fatal, deadly areas. As had been the case
with the kulaks, the German exile had no juridical basis. The
Criminal Code in itself was one thing, and the exile of hundreds of
thousands of people was something else entirely. It was the per-
sonal edict of a monarch. In addition, this was his first experiment
of the sort with an entire nationality, and he found it extremely
interesting from a theoretical point of view.

By the end of the summer of 1941, becoming bigger in the
autumn, the wave of the encircled was surging in. These were
the defenders of their native land, the very same warriors whom
the cities had seen off to the front with bouquets and bands a few
months before, who had then sustained the heaviest tank assaults
of the Germans, and in the general chaos, and through no fault
of their own, had spent a certain time as isolated units not in
enemy imprisonment, not at all, but in temporary encirclement,
and later had broken out. And instead of being given a brotherly
embrace on their return, such as every other army in the world
would have given them, instead of being given a chance to rest
up, to visit their families, and then return to their units—they
were held on suspicion, disarmed, deprived of all rights, and
taken away in groups to identification points and screening centers
where officers of the Special Branches started interrogating them,
distrusting not only their every word but their very identity.
Identification consisted of cross-questioning, confrontations, pit-
ting the evidence of one against another. Afterward, some of
those who had been encircled were restored to their former names,
ranks, and responsibilities and went off to military units. Others,
fewer in number at the start, constituted the first wave of traitors
of the Motherland under 58-1b. But at first, until the standard
penalty was finally determined, they got less than ten years.

That was how the active army was kept purged. But there was
also an enormous inactive army in the Far East and in Mongolia,

no chance to prove he was not. So he was exiled. “Is this your real name?
What assignments were you given by the Fascist intelligence service?” Then
there was that native of Tambov whose real name was Kaverznev, and who
changed it to Kolbe in 1918. At what point did he share Okorokov’s fate?

80 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

and it was the noble task of the Special Branches to keep that
army from growing rusty. And for lack of anything to do, the
_ heroes of Khalkhin-Gol and Khasan began to let their tongues
wag, especially after they were permitted to examine the Degtya-
rev automatic pistols and the regimental mortars, which until
then had been kept secret even from Soviet soldiers. With such
weapons in their hands, it was hard for them to understand why
we were retreating in the west. With all Siberia and the Urals
between them and European Russia, it was not easy for them to
grasp that in retreating seventy miles a day we were simply re-
peating the Kutuzov entrapment maneuver. Their comprehension
could be helped along only by means of a wave from the Eastern
Army. And at that point lips tightened and faith became steely.

It was obvious that a wave had also to roll in high places—of
those to blame for the retreat. (After all, it was not the Great
Strategist who was at fault!) It was a small wave, just half a hun-
dred men, a generals’ wave. They were in Moscow prisons by the
summer of 1941, and in October, 1941, they were sent off on a
prisoner transport. Most of the generals were from the air force;
among them were Air Force Commander Smushkevich and Gen-
eral Ptukhin, who was known to have said: “If I had known, I
would have first bombed our Dear Father, and then gone off to
prison!” And there were others.

The victory outside Moscow gave. rise to a new wave: guilty
Muscovites. Looking at things after the event, it turned out that
those Muscovites who had not run away and who had not been
evacuated but had fearlessly remained in the threatened capital,
which had been abandoned by the authorities, were by that very
token under suspicion either of subverting governmental authority
(58-10); or of staying on to await the Germans (58-1a, via 19, a
wave which kept on providing fodder for the interrogators of
Moscow and Leningrad right up to 1945).

It need hardly be said that 58-10, ASA—Anti-Soviet Agita-
tion—never let up but hovered over the front and in the rear
throughout the war. Sentences under 58-10 were handed out to
evacuees who talked about the horrors of the retreat (it was
clear from the newspapers that the retreat was proceeding accord-
ing to plan) ; to those in the rear who were guilty of the slanderous
rumor that rations were meager; to those at the front who were
guilty of the slanderous rumor that the Germans had excellent

The History of Our Sewage Disposal System | 81

equipment; and to those everywhere who, in 1942, were guilty of
the slanderous rumor that people were dying of starvation in
blockaded Leningrad.

During that same year, after the disasters at Kerch (120,000
prisoners), at Kharkov (even more), and in the course of the
big southern retreat to the Caucasus and the Volga, another very
important wave of officers and soldiers was pumped through—
those who refused to stand to the death and who retreated without
permission, the men whom, in the words of Stalin’s immortal
Order No. 227, the Motherland could not forgive for the shame
they had caused her. This wave, however, never reached Gulag:
after accelerated processing by divisional tribunals, it was, to a
man, herded into punishment battalions, and was soaked up in
the red sand of advanced positions, leaving not a trace. Thus was
cemented the foundation of the Stalingrad victory, but it has
found no place in the usual Russian history and exists only in the
private history of the sewage system.

(Incidentally, we are here trying to identify only those waves
which came into Gulag from outside. There was, after all,
an incessant internal recirculation from reservoir to reservoir,
through the system of so-called sentencing in camp, which was
particularly rampant during the war years. But we are not con-
sidering those in this chapter. )

Conscientiousness requires that we recall also the reverse waves
of wartime: the previously mentioned Czechs and Poles who
were released; as well as criminals released for service at the front.

From 1943 on, when the war turned in our favor, there began
the multimillion wave from the occupied territories and from
Europe, which got larger every year up to 1946. Its two main
divisions were:

e Civilians who had lived under the Germans or among
Germans—hung with a tenner under the letter “a”: 58-1a.

e Military personnel who had been POW’s—who were
nailed with a tenner under the letter “b”: 58-1b.

Everyone living under the occupation wanted, of course, to
survive, and therefore could not remain with hands folded, and
thereby theoretically earned, along with his daily bread, a future
sentence—if not for treason to the Motherland, then at least for

82 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

aiding and abetting the enemy. However, in actual practice, it
was enough to note in the passport serial number that a per-
son had been in occupied territory. To arrest all such persons
would have been, from the economic point of view, irrational,
because it would have depopulated such enormous areas. All
that was required in order to heighten the general consciousness
was to arrest a certain percentage—of those guilty, those half-
guilty, those quarter-guilty, and those who had hung out their
footcloths to dry on the same branch as the Germans.

After all, even one percent of just one million fills up a dozen
full-blooded camps.

And dismiss the thought that honorable participation in an
underground anti-German organization would surely protect one
from being arrested in this wave. More than one case proved this.
For instance, there was the Kiev Komsomol member whom the
underground organization sent to serve in the Kiev police during
the German occupation in order to obtain inside information. The
boy kept the Komsomol honestly informed about everything,
but when our forces arrived on the scene, he got his tenner be-
cause he couldn’t, while serving in the police, fail to acquire some
of the enemy’s spirit or to carry out some enemy orders.

Those who were in Europe got the stiffest punishments of all,
even though they went there as conscripted German slaves. That
was because they had seen something of European life and could
talk about it. And their stories, which made unpleasant listening
for us (except, of course, for the travel notes of sensible writers),
were especially unpleasant during the postwar years of ruin and
disorganization; not everyone, after all, was able to report that
things in Europe were hopelessly bad and that it was absolutely
impossible to live there.

That also was the reason why they sentenced the majority of
war prisoners (it was not simply because they had allowed them-
selves to be captured), particularly those POW’s who had seen a
little more of the West than a German death camp.*” This was

42. That was not such a clear-cut decision at the start. Even in 1943 there
were certain separate waves which were like no others—like the so-called
“Africans,” who bore this nickname for a long time at the Vorkuta construc-
tion projects. These were Russian war prisoners of the Germans, who had been
taken prisoner a second time when the Americans captured them from Rom-
mel’s army in Africa (the “Hiwi”). In 1943 they were sent in Studebakers,
through Egypt, Iraq, and Iran, to their Motherland. And on a desert gulf of the

The History of Our Sewage Disposal System | 83

obvious from the fact that interned persons were sentenced as
severely as POW’s. For example, during the first days of the war
one of our destroyers went aground on Swedish territory. Its crew
proceeded to live freely in Sweden during all the rest of the war,
and in such comfort and plenty as they had never experienced
before and would never experience again. The U.S.S.R. retreated,
attacked, starved and died, while those scoundrels stuffed their
neutral mugs. After the war Sweden returned them to us along
with the destroyer. Their treason to the Motherland was indubi-
table—but somehow the case didn’t get off the ground. They let
them go their different ways and then pasted them with Anti-
Soviet Agitation for their lovely stories in praise of freedom and
good eating in capitalist Sweden. (This was the Kadenko

group. )*°

Caspian, they were immediately put behind barbed wire. The police who
received them ripped off their military insignia and liberated them of all things
the Americans had given them (keeping them for themselves, of course, not
turning them over to the state); then they sent them off to Vorkuta to await
special orders, without (due to inexperience) sentencing them to a specific
term under any article of the Code. These “Africans” lived in Vorkuta in a
betwixt-and-between condition. They were not under guard, but they were
given no passes, and without passes they could not take so much as one step
in Vorkuta. They were paid wages at the same rate as free workers, but they
were treated like prisoners. And the special orders never did come. They were
forgotten men.

43. What happened to this group later makes an anecdote. In camp they
kept their mouths shut about Sweden, fearing they’d get a second term. But
people in Sweden somehow found out about their fate and published slanderous
reports in the press. By that time the boys were scattered far and near among
various camps. Suddenly, on the strength of special orders, they were all
yanked out and taken to the Kresty Prison in Leningrad. There they were fed
for two months as though for slaughter and allowed to let their hair grow.
Then they were dressed with modest elegance, rehearsed on what to say and
to whom, and warned that any bastard who dared to squeak out of turn would
get a bullet in his skull—and they were led off to a press conference for selected
foreign journalists and some others who had known the entire crew in Sweden.
The former internees bore themselves cheerfully described where they were
living, studying, and working, and expressed their indignation at the bourgeois
slander they had read about not long before in the Western press (after all,
Western papers are sold in the Soviet Union at every corner newsstand!). And
so they had written to one another and decided to gather in Leningrad. (Their
travel expenses didn’t bother them in the least.) Their fresh, shiny appearance
completely gave the lie to the newspaper canard. The discredited journalists
went off to write their apologies. It was wholly inconceivable to the Western
imagination that there could be any other explanation. And the men who had
been the subjects of the interview were taken off to a bath, had their hair
cut off again, were dressed in their former rags, and sent back to the same
camps. But because they had conducted themselves properly, none of them
was given a second term.

84 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

Within the over-all wave of those from formerly occupied areas,
there followed, one after another, the quick and compact waves
of the nationalities which had transgressed:

e In 1943, the Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, and Balkars.
e In 1944, the Crimean Tatars.

They would not have been pushed out into eternal exile so
energetically and swiftly had it not been that ‘regular army units
and military trucks were assigned to help the Organs. The military
units gallantly surrounded the auls, or settlements, and, within
twenty-four hours, with the speed of a parachute attack, those
who had nested there for centuries past found themselves removed
to railroad stations, loaded by the trainload, and rushed off to
Siberia, Kazakhstan, Central Asia, and the Russian North. Within
one day their land and their property had been turned over to
their “heirs.”

What had happened to the Germans at the beginning of the
war now happened to these nationalities: they were exiled solely
on the basis of blood. There was no filling out of questionnaires;
Party members, Heroes of Labor, and heroes of the still-unfinished
war were all sent along with the rest.

During the last years of the war, of course, there was a wave
of German war criminals who were selected from the POW
camps and transferred by court verdict to the jurisdiction of
Gulag.

In 1945, even though the war with Japan didn’t last three
weeks, great numbers of Japanese war prisoners were raked in
for urgent construction projects in Siberia and Central Asia, and
the same process of selecting war criminals for Gulag was carried
out among them.**

At the end of 1944, when our army entered the Balkans, and
especially in 1945, when it reached into Central Europe, a wave
of Russian émigrés flowed through the channels of Gulag. Most
were old men, who had left at the time of the Revolution, but
there were also young people, who had grown up outside Russia.
They usually dragged off the menfolk and left the women and

44, Without knowing the details, I am nevertheless convinced that a great
many of these Japanese could not have been sentenced legitimately. It was an

act of revenge, as well as a means of holding onto manpower for as long a
period as possible.

The History of Our Sewage Disposal System | 85

children where they were. It is true that they did not take every-
one, but they took all those who, in the course of twenty-five
years, had expressed even the mildest political views, or who had
expressed them earlier, during the Revolution. They did not touch
those who had lived a purely vegetable existence. The main waves
came from Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia; there were
fewer from Austria and Germany. In the other countries of
Fastern Europe, there were hardly any Russians.

As if in response to 1945, a wave of émigrés poured from
Manchuria too. (Some of them were not arrested immediately.
Entire families were encouraged to return to the homeland as free
persons, but once back in Russia they were separated and sent
into exile or taken to prison. )

All during 1945 and 1946 a big wave of genuine, at-long-last,
enemies of the Soviet government flowed into the Archipelago.
(These were the Vlasov men, the Krasnov Cossacks, and Moslems
from the national units created under Hitler.) Some of them had
acted out of conviction; others had been merely involuntary par-
ticipants.

Along with them were seized not less than one million fugitives
from the Soviet government—civilians of all ages and of both
sexes who had been fortunate enough to find shelter on Allied
territory, but who in 1946-1947 were perfidiously returned by
Allied authorities into Soviet hands.*

45. It is surprising that in the West, where political secrets cannot be kept
long, since they inevitably come out in print or are disclosed, the secret of this
particular act of betrayal has been very well and carefully kept by the British
and American governments. This is truly the last secret, or one of the last,
of the Second World War. Having often encountered these people in camps,
I was unable to believe for a whole quarter-century that the public in the
West knew nothing of this action of the Western governments, this massive
handing over of ordinary Russian people to retribution and death. Not until
1973—in the Sunday Oklahoman of January 21—was an article by Julius
Epstein published. And I am here going to be so bold as to express gratitude
on behalf of the mass of those who perished and those few left alive. One
random little document was published from the many volumes of the hitherto
concealed case history of forced repatriation to the Soviet Union. “After hav-
ing remained unmolested in British hands for two years, they had allowed
themselves to be lulled into a false sense of security and they were therefore
taken completely by surprise. . . . They did not realize they were being re-
patriated. ... They were mainly simple peasants with bitter personal grievances
against the Bolsheviks.” The English authorities gave them the treatment
“reserved in the case of every other nation for war criminals alone: that of
being handed over against their will to captors who, incidentally, were not
expected to give them a fair trial.” They were all sent to destruction on the
Archipelago. (Author’s note, dated 1973.)

86 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

A certain number of Poles, members of the Home Army, fol-
lowers of Mikolajczyk, arrived in Gulag in 1945 via our prisons.
There were a certain number of Rumanians and Hungarians.

At war’s end and for many years after, there flowed uninter-
ruptedly an abundant wave of Ukrainian nationalists (the “Ban-
derovtsy”).

Against the background of this enormous postwar displace-
ment of millions, few paid much attention to such small waves as:

e Foreigners’ girl friends (in 1946—1947 )—in other words,
Soviet girls who went out with foreigners. They sentenced these
girls under Article 7-35—-SOE—Socially Dangerous Element.

e Spanish children—the same children who had been taken
from their homeland during the Spanish Civil War, but who
were adults by the end of World War II. Raised in our board-
ing schools, they nonetheless fitted very poorly into our life.
Many longed to go “home.” They, too, were given 7-35—-SOE
—Socially Dangerous Element. And those who were particu-
larly stubborn got 58-6—espionage on behalf of America.

(In fairness we must not forget the brief reverse wave of priests
in 1947. Yes, a miracle! For the first time in thirty years they
freed priests! They didn’t actually go about seeking them out in
camps, but whenever a priest was known to people in freedom,
and whenever a name and exact location could be provided, the
individual priests in question were sent out to freedom in order to
strengthen the church, which at that time was being revived.)

We have to remind our readers once again that this chapter
does not attempt by any means to list all the waves which fertilized
Gulag—but only those which had a political coloration. And
just as, in a course in physiology, after a detailed description of
the circulation of the blood, one can begin over again and de-
scribe in detail the lymphatic system, one could begin again and
describe the waves of nonpolitical offenders and habitual criminals
from 1918 to 1953. And this description, too, would run long.
It would bring to light many famous decrees, now in part for-

The History of Our Sewage Disposal System | 87

gotten (even though they have never been repealed), which
supplied abundant human material for the insatiable Archipelago.
One was the Decree on Absenteeism. One was the Decree on Pro-
duction of Bad Quality Goods. Another was on samogon [moon-
shine] distilling. Its peak period was 1922—but arrests for this
were constant throughout the twenties. And the Decree on the
Punishment of Collective Farmers for Failure to Fulfill the
Obligatory Norm of Labor Days. And the Decree on the Intro-
duction of Military Discipline on Railroads, issued in April, 1943
—not at the beginning of the war, but when it had already taken
a turn for the better.

In accordance with the ancient Petrine tradition, these decrees
always put in an appearance as the most important element in all
our legislation, but without any comprehension of or reference to
the whole of our previous legislation. Learned jurists were sup-
posed to coordinate the branches of the law, but they were not
particularly energetic at it, nor particularly successful either.

This steady pulse of decrees led to a curious national pattern of
violations and crimes. One could easily recognize that neither
burglary, nor murder, nor samogon distilling, nor rape ever
seemed to occur at random intervals or in random places through-
out the country as a result of human weakness, lust, or failure to
control one’s passions. By no means! One. detected, instead, a
surprising unanimity and monotony in the crimes committed. The
entire Soviet Union would be in a turmoil of rape alone, or mur-
der alone, or samogon distilling alone, each in its turn—in sensi-
tive reaction to the latest government decree. Each particular
crime or violation seemed somehow to be playing into the hands
of the latest decree so that it would disappear from the scene that
much faster! At that precise moment, the particular crime which
had just been foreseen, and for which wise new legislation had
just provided stricter punishment, would explode simultaneously
everywhere.

The Decree on the militarization of railroads crowded the
military tribunals with the women and adolescents who did most
of the work on the railroads during the war years and who, having
received no barracks training beforehand, were those mostly in-
volved in delays and violations. The Decree on Failure to Ful-
fill the Obligatory Norm of Labor Days greatly simplified the

88 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

procedure for removing from the scene those collective farmers
who were dissatisfied with receiving for their labor mere “labor
day” points in the farm account books and wanted produce in-
stead. Whereas previously their cases had required a trial, based
on the article of the Code relating to “economic counterrevolu-
tion,” now it was enough to produce a collective farm decree
confirmed by the District Executive Committee. And even then
these collective farmers, although they were sent into exile, must
have been relieved to know that they were not listed as enemies
of the people. The obligatory norm of “labor days” was different
in different areas, the easiest of all being among the peoples of
the Caucasus—seventy-five “labor days” a year; but despite that,
many of them were also sent off to Krasnoyarsk Province for
eight years.

As we have said, we are not going to go into a lengthy and
lavish examination of the waves of nonpolitical offenders and
common criminals. But, having reached 1947, we cannot remain
silent about one of the most grandiose of Stalin’s decrees. We
have already mentioned the famous law of “Seven-Eight” or
“Seven-eighths,” on the basis of which they arrested people right
and left—for taking a stalk of grain, a cucumber, two small
potatoes, a chip of wood, a spool of thread—all of whom got
ten years.*®

But the requirements of the times, as Stalin understood them,
had changed, and the tenner, which had seemed adequate on the
eve of a terrible war, seemed now, in the wake of a world-wide
historical victory, inadequate. And so again, in complete dis-
regard of the Code, and totally overlooking the fact that many
different articles and decrees on the subject of thefts and rob-
beries already existed, on June 4, 1947, a decree was issued
which outdid them all. It was instantly christened “Four-sixths”
by the undismayed prisoners.

The advantages of the new decree lay first of all in its newness.
From the very moment it appeared, a torrent of the crimes it
specified would be bound to burst forth, thereby providing an
abundant wave of newly sentenced prisoners. But it offered an

46. In the actual documents of the “spool of thread” case, they wrote down
“200 meters of sewing material.” The fact remains that they were ashamed to
write “a spool of thread.”

The History of Our Sewage Disposal System | 89

even greater advantage in prison terms. If a young girl sent into
the fields to get a few ears of grain took along two friends for com-
pany (“an organized gang”) or some twelve-year-old youngsters
went after cucumbers or apples, they were liable to get twenty
years in camp. In factories, the maximum sentence was raised to
twenty-five years. (This sentence, called the quarter, had been
introduced a few days earlier to replace the death penalty, which
had been abolished as a humane act.) *”

And then, at long last, an ancient shortcoming of the law was
corrected. Previously the only failure to make a denunciation
which qualified as a crime against the state had been in connection
with political offenses. But now simple failure to report the theft
of state or collective farm property earned three years of camp or
seven years of exile.

In the years immediately following this decree, whole “divi-
sions” from the countryside and the cities were sent off to cultivate
the islands of Gulag in place of the natives who had died off there.
True, these waves were processed through the police and the
ordinary courts, and did not clog the channels of State Security,
which, even without them, were overstrained in the postwar years.

Stalin’s new line, suggesting that it was necessary, in the wake
of the victory over fascism, to jail more people more energetically
and for longer terms than ever before, had immediate repercus-
sions, of course, on political prisoners.

The year 1948—1949, notable throughout Soviet public life for
intensified persecution and vigilance, was marked by one tragi-
comedy hitherto unheard of even in Stalinist antijustice—that of
the repeaters.

That is what, in the language of Gulag, they called those still
undestroyed unfortunates of 1937 vintage, who had succeeded in
surviving ten impossible, unendurable years, and who in 1947—
1948, had timidly stepped forth onto the land of freedom...
worn out, broken in health, but hoping to live out in peace what
little of their lives remained. But some sort of savage fantasy (or
stubborn malice, or unsated vengeance) pushed the Victorious

47. And the death penalty itself was kept veiled for a brief period only;
the veil was removed, amid a show of bared fangs, two and a half years later
—in January, 1950.

90 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

Generalissimo into issuing the order to arrest all those cripples
over again, without any new charges! It was even disadvantageous,
both economically and politically, to clog the meat grinder with
its own refuse. But Stalin issued the order anyway. Here was a
case in which a historical personality simply behaved capriciously
toward historical necessity.

And so it was necessary to take all of them though they had
hardly had a chance to attach themselves to new places or new
families. They were rounded up with much the same weary in-
dolence they themselves now returned with. They knew before-
hand the whole way of the cross ahead. They did not ask “What
for?” And they did not say to their families: “I'll be back.” They
put on their shabbiest rags, poured some makhorka into their
camp tobacco pouches, and went off to sign the deposition. (Only
one question: “Are you the one who was in prison?” “Yes.” “Take
ten more.” )

At this point the Autocrat decided it wasn’t enough to arrest
just those who had survived since 1937! What about the children
of his sworn enemies? They, too, must be imprisoned! They were
growing up, and they might have notions of vengeance. (He may
have had a heavy dinner and had a nightmare about those chil-
dren.) They went through the lists, looked around, and arrested
children—but not very many. They arrested the children of the
purged army commanders, but not all the children of Trotskyites.
And so the wave of the vengeful children came into being.
(Among such children were seventeen-year-old Lena Kosaryeva
and thirty-five-year-old Yelena Rakovskaya. )

By 1948, after the great European displacement, Stalin had
succeeded once again in tightly barricading himself in and pulling
the ceiling down closer to him: in this reduced space he had re-
created the tension of 1937.

And so in 1948, 1949, and 1950 there flowed past:

e Alleged spies (ten years earlier they had been German
and Japanese, now they were Anglo-American).

e Believers (this wave non-Orthodox for the most part).

e Those geneticists and plant breeders, disciples of the late
Vavilov and of Mendel, who had not previously been arrested.

e Just plain ordinary thinking people (and students, with
particular severity) who had not been sufficiently scared away

The History of Our Sewage Disposal System | 91

from the West. It was fashionable to charge them with:
e VAT—Praise of American Technology;
e VAD—Praise of American Democracy; and
e PZ—Toadyism Toward the West.

These waves were not unlike those of 1937, but the sentences
were different. The standard sentence was no longer the patri-
archal ten-ruble bill, but the new Stalinist twenty-five. By now
the tenner was for juveniles.

There was a good-sized wave from the new Decree on Reveal-
ing State Secrets. (State secrets included such things as: the
district harvest; any figure on epidemics; the type of goods pro-
duced by any workshop or mini-factory; mention of a civil airport,
municipal transport routes, or the family name of any prisoner
imprisoned in any camp.) For violations of this decree they gave
fifteen years.

The waves of nationalities were not forgotten either. The
Ukrainian nationalists, the “Banderovtsy,” taken in the heat of
struggle from the forests where they fought, kept flowing all this
time. Simultaneously, all West Ukrainian country people received
tenners and fivers in camps and exile—presumably for having
had connections with the partisans: someone had let them spend
the night; someone had once fed them; someone had not reported
them. For about a year, starting in 1950, a wave of wives of
Banderovtsy was under way. They gave them each ten years for
failure to make a denunciation—-so as to finish off their husbands
faster. |

By this time resistance in Lithuania and Estonia had already
come to an end. But in 1949 new waves of new “social prophy-
laxis” to assure collectivization kept coming. They took whole
trainloads of city dwellers and peasants from the three Baltic
republics into Siberian exile. (The historical rhythm was dis-
rupted in these republics: they were forced to recapitulate in
brief, limited periods the more extended experience of the rest
of the country.)

In 1948 one more nationalist wave went into exile—that of the
Greeks who inhabited the areas around the Sea of Azov, the
Kuban, and Sukhumi. They had done nothing to offend the
Father during the war, but now he avenged himself on them for
his failure in Greece, or so it seemed. This wave, too, was: evi-

92 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

dently the fruit of his personal insanity. The majority of the
Greeks ended up in Central Asian exile; those who voiced their
discontent were thrown into political prisons.

Around 1950, to avenge the same lost war, or perhaps just to
balance those already in exile, the Greek rebels from Markos’
army, who had been turned over to us by Bulgaria, were them-
selves shipped off to the Archipelago.

During the last years of Stalin’s life, a wave of Jews became
noticeable. (From 1950 on they were hauled in little by little as
cosmopolites. And that was why the doctors’ case was cooked up.
It would appear that Stalin intended to arrange a great massacre
of the Jews. )*

But this became the first plan of his life to fail. God told him
—apparently with the help of human hands—to depart from his
rib cage.

The preceding exposition should have made it clear, one
would think, that in the removal of millions and in the populating
of Gulag, consistent, cold-blooded planning and never-weakening
persistence were at work.

That we never did have any empty prisons, merely prisons
which were full or prisons which were very, very overcrowded.

And that while you occupied yourself to your heart’s content
studying the safe secrets of the atomic nucleus, researching the
influence of Heidegger on Sartre, or collecting Picasso reproduc-
tions; while you rode off in your railroad sleeping compartment
to vacation resorts, or finished building your country house near
Moscow—the Black Marias rolled incessantly through the streets
and the gaybisty—the State Security men—knocked at doors and
rang doorbells.

And I think this exposition proves that the Organs always
earned their pay.

48. It has always been impossible to learn the truth about anything in our
country—now, and always, and from the beginning. But, according to Moscow
rumors,. Stalin’s plan was this: At the beginning of March the “doctor-mur-
derers” were to be hanged on Red Square. The aroused patriots, spurred on,
naturally, by instructors, were to rush into an anti-Jewish pogrom. At this
point the government—and here Stalin’s character can be divined, can it not?
—would intervene generously to save the Jews from the wrath of the people,
and that same night would remove them from Moscow to the Far East and
Siberia—where barracks had already been prepared for them.

Chapter 3

The Interrogation

If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their
time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years
had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be
practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls
squeezed within iron rings;* that a human being would be lowered
into an acid bath;? that they would be trussed up naked to be
bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus
stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the “secret brand”);
that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe
of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances,
prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a
week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of
Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the
heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.

Yes, not only Chekhov’s heroes, but what normal Russian at
the beginning of the century, including any member of the Rus-
sian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, could have believed,
would have tolerated, such a slander against the bright future?
What had been acceptable under Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich in
the. seventeenth century, what had already been regarded as
barbarism under Peter the Great, what might have been used
against ten or twenty people in all during the time of Biron in the

1. Dr. S., according to the testimony of A.P.K va.
2. K. S. T——..

93

94 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

mid-eighteenth century, what had already become totally impos-
sible under Catherine the Great, was all being practiced during
the flowering of the glorious twentieth century—in a society based
on socialist principles, and at a time when airplanes were flying
and the radio and talking films had already appeared—not by one
scoundrel alone in one secret place only, but by tens of thousands
of specially trained human beasts standing over millions of de-
fenseless victims. l

Was it only that explosion of atavism which is now evasively
called “the cult of personality” that was so horrible? Or was it
even more horrible that during those same years, in 1937 itself,
we celebrated Pushkin’s centennial? And that we shamelessly
continued to stage those self-same Chekhov plays, even though
the answers to them had already come in? Is it not still more
dreadful that we are now being told, thirty years later, “Don’t
talk about it!”? If we start to recall the sufferings of millions, we
are told it will distort the historical perspective! If we doggedly
seek out the essence of our morality, we are told it will darken
our material progress! Let’s think rather about the blast furnaces,
the rolling mills that were built, the canals that were dug . . . no,
better not talk about the canals. . .. Then maybe about the gold
of the Kolyma? No, maybe we ought not to talk about that
either. ... Well, we can talk about anything, so long as we do it
adroitly, so long as we glorify it....

It is really hard to see why we condemn the Inquisition. Wasn’t
it true that beside the autos-da-fé, magnificent services were
offered the Almighty? It is hard to see why we are so down on
serfdom. After all, no one forbade the peasants to work every
day. And they could sing carols at Christmas too. And for Trinity
Day the girls wove wreaths. . . .

The exceptional character which written and oral legend now-
adays assigns to the year 1937 is seen in the creation of fabri-
cated charges and tortures. But this is untrue, wrong. Throughout
the years and decades, interrogations under Article 58 were al-
most never undertaken to elicit the truth, but were simply an
exercise in an inevitably filthy procedure: someone who had been

The Interrogation | 95

free only a little while before, who was sometimes proud and
always unprepared, was to be bent and pushed through a narrow
pipe where his sides would be torn by iron hooks and where he
could not breathe, so that he would finally pray to get to the
other end. And at the other end, he would be shoved out, an
already processed native of the Archipelago, already in the
promised land. (The fool would keep on resisting! He even
thought there was a way back out of the pipe.)

The more time that passes without anything being written
about all this, the harder it becomes to assemble the scattered
testimony of the survivors. But they tell us that the creation of
fabricated cases began back in the early years of the Organs so
their constant salutary activity might be perceived as essential.
Otherwise, what with a decline in the number of enemies, the
Organs might, in a bad hour, have been forced to wither away.
As the case of Kosyrev makes clear,* the situation of the Cheka
was shaky even at the beginning of 1919. Reading the newspapers
of 1918, I ran into the official report of a terrible plot that had
just been discovered: A group of ten people wanted to (it seems
they only wanted to!) drag cannon onto the roof of an orphanage
(let’s see—how high was it?) and shell the Kremlin. There were
ten of them (including, perhaps, women and youngsters), and
it was not reported how many cannon there were to be—nor
where the cannon were to come from. Nor what caliber they were.
Nor how they were to be carried up the stairs to the attic. Nor
how they were to be set up, on the steeply sloping roof, and so
they wouldn’t recoil when fired! How was it that the Petersburg
police, when they were fighting to put down the February Revo-
lution, took nothing heavier than a machine gun up to the roofs?
Yet this fantasy, exceeding even the fabrications of 1937, was
read and believed! Apparently, it will be proved to us in time
that the Gumilyev case of 1921 was also fabricated.*

In that same year, 1921, the Ryazan Cheka fabricated a false
case of a “plot” on the part of the local intelligentsia. But the
protests of courageous people could still reach Moscow, and
they dropped the case. That year, too, the whole Sapropelite Com-

3. Cf. Part I, Chapter 8, below.
4. A. A. Akhmatova told me she was convinced that this was so. She even
gave me the name of the Chekist who cooked up the case—Y. Agranov, it seems.

96 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

mittee, part of the Commission on the Use of Natural Forces, was
shot. Familiar enough with the attitude and the mood of Russian
scientists at that time, and not being shut off from those years
by a smoke screen of fanaticism, we can, indeed, figure out, even
without archaeological excavations, the precise validity of that
case.

Here is what Y. Doyarenko remembers about 1921: the Lub-
yanka reception cell for those newly arrested, with forty to fifty
trestle beds, and women being brought in one after another all
night long. None of them knew what she was supposed to be
guilty of, and there was a feeling among them that people were
being arrested for no reason at all. Only one woman in the whole
cell knew why she was there—she was an SR. The first question
asked by Yagoda: “Well, what are you here for?” In other words,
you tell me, and help me cook up the case! And they say abso-
lutely the same thing about the Ryazan GPU in 1930! People all
felt they were being imprisoned for no reason. There was so little
on which to base a charge that they accused I. D. T v of
using a false name. (And even though his name was perfectly
real, they handed him three years via a Special Board—-OSO—
under 58-10.) Not knowing what to pick on, the interrogator
asked: “What was your job?” Answer: “A planner.” The inter-
rogater: “Write me a statement that explains ‘planning at the
factory and how it is carried out.’ After that I will let you know
why you’ve been arrested.” (He expected the explanation to pro-
vide the hook on which to hang a charge. )

Here is the way it went in the case of the Kovno Fortress in
1912: Since the fortress served no useful military purpose, it was
decided to eliminate it. At that point the fortress command,
thoroughly alarmed, arranged a “night attack” simply to prove its
usefulness and in order to stay where they were!

The theoretical view of the suspect’s guilt was, incidentally,
quite elastic from the very beginning. In his instructions on the
use of Red Terror, the Chekist M. I. Latsis wrote: “In the inter-
rogation do not seek evidence and proof that the person accused
acted in word or deed against Soviet power. The first questions
should be: What is his class, what is his origin, what is his educa-
tion and upbringing? [There is your Sapropelite Committee for
you!] These are the questions which must determine the fate of

The Interrogation | 97

the accused.” On November 13, 1920, Dzerzhinsky reported in a
letter to the Cheka that “slanderous declarations are often given
the green light” in the Cheka.

After so many decades have they not taught us that people do
not return from there? Except for the small, brief, intentional re-
verse wave of 1939, one hears only the rarest, isolated stories of
someone being turned loose as the result of an interrogation. And
in such cases, the person was either imprisoned soon again or
else he was let out so he could be kept under surveillance. That
is how the tradition arose that the Organs do not make mistakes.
Then what about those who were innocent?

In his Dictionary of Definitions Dal makes the following dis-
tinction: “An inquiry is distinguished from an investigation by
the fact that it is carried out to determine whether there is a basis
for proceeding to an investigation.”

On, sacred simplicity! The Organs have never heard of such a
thing as an inquiry! Lists of names prepared up above, or an
initial suspicion, or a denunciation by an informer, or any anony-
mous denunciation,’ were all that was needed to bring about the
arrest of the suspect, followed by the inevitable formal charge.
The time allotted for investigation was not used to unravel the
crime but, in ninety-five cases out of a hundred, to exhaust, wear
down, weaken, and render helpless the defendant, so that he
would want it to end at any cost.

As long ago as 1919 the chief method used by the interrogator
was a revolver on the desk. That was how they investigated not
only political but also ordinary misdemeanors and violations. At
the trial of the Main Fuels Committee (1921), the accused
Makhrovskaya complained that at her interrogation she had been
drugged with cocaine. The prosecutor replied: “If she had de-
clared that she had been treated rudely, that they had threatened
to shoot her, this might be just barely believable.”® The frighten-
ing revolver lies there and sometimes it is aimed at you, and the
interrogator doesn’t tire himself out thinking up what you are

5. Article 93 of the Code of Criminal Procedure has this to say: “An anony-
mous declaration can serve as reason for beginning a criminal case”! (And
there is no need to be surprised at the word “criminal” here, since all “politicals”
were considered criminals, too, under the Code.)

6. N. V. Krylenko, Za Pyat Let (1918-1922) (The Last Five Years [1918-
1922]), Moscow-Petrograd, GIZ, 1923, p. 401.

98 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

guilty of, but shouts: “Come on, talk! You know what about!”
That was what the interrogator Khaikin demanded of Skripnikova
in 1927. That was what they demanded of Vitkovsky in 1929.
And twenty-five years later nothing had changed. In 1952 Anna
Skripnikova was undergoing her fifth imprisonment, and Sivakov,
Chief of the Investigative Department of the Ordzhonikidze
State Security Administration, said to her: “The prison doctor re-
ports you have a blood pressure of 240/120. That’s too low, you
bitch! We’re going to drive it up to 340 so you'll kick the bucket,
you viper, and with no black and blue marks; no beatings; no
broken bones. We’ll just not let you sleep.” She was in her fifties
at the time. And if, back in her cell, after a night spent in inter-
rogation, she closed her eyes during the day, the jailer broke in
and shouted: “Open your eyes or ll haul you off that cot by the
legs and tie you to the wall standing up.”

As early as 1921 interrogations usually took place at night.
At that time, too, they shone automobile lights in the prisoner’s
face (the Ryazan Cheka—Stelmakh). And at the Lubyanka in
1926 (according to the testimony of Berta Gandal) they made
use of the hot-air heating system to fill the cell first with icy-cold
and then with stinking hot air. And there was an airtight cork-
lined cell in which there was no ventilation and they cooked the
prisoners. The poet Klyuyev was apparently confined in such a
cell and Berta Gandal also. A participant in the Yaroslavl up-
rising of 1918, Vasily Aleksandrovich Kasyanov, described how
the heat in such a cell was turned up until your blood began to
ooze through your pores. When they saw this happening through
the peephole, they would put the prisoner on a stretcher and take
him off to sign his confession. The “hot” and “salty” methods of
the “gold” period are well known. And in Georgia in 1926 they
used lighted cigarettes to burn the hands of prisoners under
interrogation. In Metekhi Prison they pushed prisoners into a
cesspool in the dark.

There is a very simple connection here. Once it was established
that charges had to be brought at any cost and despite everything,
threats, violence, tortures became inevitable. And the more fan-
tastic the charges were, the more ferocious the interrogation had
to be in order to force the required confession. Given the fact
that the cases were always fabricated, violence and torture had

The Interrogation | 99

to accompany them. This was not peculiar to 1937 alone. It was
a chronic, general practice. And that is why it seems strange
today to read in the recollections of former zeks that “torture was
permitted from the spring of 1938 on.”’ There were never any
spiritual or moral barriers which could have held the Organs
back from torture. In the early postwar years, in the Cheka
Weekly, The Red Sword, and Red Terror, the admissibility of
torture from a Marxist point of view was openly debated. Judging
by the subsequent course of events, the answer deduced was
positive, though not universally so.

It is more accurate to say that if before 1938 some kind of
formal documentation was required as a preliminary to torture,
as well as specific permission for each case under investigation
(even though such permission was easy to obtain), then in the
years 1937—1938, in view of the extraordinary situation prevail-
ing (the specified millions of admissions to the Archipelago had
to be ground through the apparatus of individual interrogation
in specified, limited periods, something which had simply not
happened in the mass waves of kulaks and nationalities), inter-
rogators were allowed to use violence and torture on an unlimited
basis, at their own discretion, and in accordance with the demands
of their work quotas and the amount of time they were given.
The types of torture used were not regulated and every kind of
ingenuity was permitted, no matter what.

In 1939 such indiscriminate authorization was withdrawn,
and once again written permission was required for torture, and
perhaps it may not have been so easily granted. (Of course, sim-
ple threats, blackmail, deception, exhaustion through enforced
sleeplessness, and punishment cells were never prohibited.) Then,
from the end of the war and throughout the postwar years, certain
categories of prisoners were established by decree for whom a
broad range of torture was automatically permitted. Among these
were nationalists, particularly the Ukrainians and the Lithuani-
ans, especially in those cases where an underground organization

7. Y. Ginzburg writes that permission for “physical measures of persuasion”
was given in April, 1938. V. Shalamov believes that tortures were permitted
from the middle of 1938 on. The old prisoner M———ch is convinced that there
was an “order to simplify the questioning and to change from psychological
methods to physical methods.” Ivanov-Razumnik singles out the middle of 1938
as the “period of the most cruel interrogations.”

100 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

existed (or was suspected) that had to be completely uncovered,
which meant obtaining the names of everyone involved from those
already arrested. For example, there were about fifty Lithuanians
in the group of Romualdas Skyrius, the son of Pranus. In 1945
they were charged with posting anti-Soviet leaflets. Because there
weren’t enough prisons in Lithuania at the time, they sent them
to a camp near Velsk in Archangel Province. There some were
tortured and others simply couldn’t endure the double regime of
work plus interrogation, with the result that all fifty, to the very
last one, confessed. After a short time news came from Lithuania
that the real culprits responsible for the leaflets had been dis-
covered, and none of the first group had been involved at all!
In 1950, at the Kuibyshev Transit Prison, I encountered a
Ukrainian from Dnepropetrovsk who had been tortured many
different ways in an effort to squeeze “contacts” and names out
of him. Among the tortures to which he had been subjected was
a punishment cell in which there was room only to stand. They
shoved a pole inside for him to hold on to so that he could sleep
—for four hours a day. After the war, they tortured Correspond-
ing Member of the Academy of Sciences Levina because she and
the Alliluyevs had acquaintances in common.

It would also be incorrect to ascribe to 1937 the “discovery”
that the personal confession of an accused person was more im-
portant than any other kind of proof or facts. This concept had
already been formulated in the twenties. And 1937 was just
the year when the brilliant teaching of Vyshinsky came into its
own. Incidentally, even at that time, his teaching was transmitted
only to interrogators and prosecutors—for the sake of their
morale and steadfastness. The rest of us only learned about it
twenty years later—when it had already come into disfavor—
through subordinate clauses and minor paragraphs of newspaper
articles, which treated the subject as if it had long been widely
known to all.

It turns out that in that terrible year Andrei Yanuaryevich
(one longs to blurt out, “Jaguaryevich”) Vyshinsky, availing
himself of the most flexible dialectics (of a sort nowadays not
permitted either Soviet citizens or electronic calculators, since to
them yes is yes and no is no), pointed out in a report which
became famous in certain circles that it is never possible for

The Interrogation | 101

mortal men to establish absolute truth, but relative truth only.
He then proceeded to a further step, which jurists of the last two
thousand years had not been willing to take: that the truth estab-
lished by interrogation and trial could not be absolute, but only,
so to speak, relative. Therefore, when we sign a sentence ordering
someone to be shot we can never be absolutely certain, but only
approximately, in view of certain hypotheses, and in a certain
sense, that we are punishing a guilty person.’ Thence arose the
most practical conclusion: that it was useless to seek absolute
evidence—for evidence is always relative—or unchallengeable
witnesses—for they can say different things at different times.
The proofs of guilt were relative, approximate, and the interro-
gator could find them, even when there was no evidence and no
witness, without leaving his office, “basing his conclusions not
only on his own intellect but also on his Party sensitivity, his
moral forces” (in other words, the superiority of someone who
has slept well, has been well fed, and has not been beaten up)
“and on his character” (i.e., his willingness to apply cruelty! ).

Of course, this formulation was much more elegant than
Latsis’ instructions. But the essence of both was the same.

In only one respect did Vyshinsky fail to be consistent and
retreat from dialectical logic: for some reason, the executioner’s
bullet which he allowed was not relative but absolute... .

Thus it was that the conclusions of advanced Soviet jurispru-
dence, proceeding in a spiral, returned to barbaric or medieval
standards. Like medieval torturers, our interrogators, prosecutors,
and judges agreed to accept the confession of the accused as the
chief proof of guilt.’

However, the simple-minded Middle Ages used dramatic and

8. Perhaps Vyshinsky, no less than his listeners, needed this ideological com-
fort at this time. When he cried out from the prosecutor’s platform: “Shoot
them all like mad dogs!” he, at least, who was both evil and quick of mind,
understood that the accused were innocent. And in all probability he and that
whale of Marxist dialectics, the defendant Bukharin, devoted themselves with
all the greater passion to the dialectical elaboration of the judicial lie: for Bu-
kharin it was too stupid and futile to die if he was altogether innocent (thus he
needed to find his own guilt!); and for Vyshinsky it was more agreeable to see
himself as a logician than as a plain downright scoundrel.

9. Compare the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States:
“Nor shall [any person] be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness
against himself.” Not be compelled! (The same thing appears in the seventeenth-
century Bill of Rights.)

102 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

picturesque methods to squeeze out the desired confessions: the
rack, the wheel, the bed of nails, impalement, hot coals, etc. In
the twentieth century, taking advantage of our more highly de-
veloped medical knowledge and extensive prison experience (and
someone seriously defended a doctoral dissertation on this
theme), people came to realize that the accumulation of such
impressive apparatus was superfluous and that, on a mass scale,
it was also cumbersome. And in addition...

In addition, there was evidently one other circumstance. As
always, Stalin did not pronounce that final word, and his sub-
ordinates had to guess what he wanted. Thus, like a jackal, he left
himself an escape hole, so that he could, if he wanted, beat a
retreat and write about “dizziness from success.” After all, for
the first time in human history the calculated torture of millions
was being undertaken, and, even with all his strength and power,
Stalin could not be absolutely sure of success. In dealing with
such an enormous mass of material, the effects of the experiment
might differ from those obtained from a smaller sample. An un-
foreseen explosion might take place, a slippage in a geological
fault, or even world-wide disclosure. In any case, Stalin had to
remain innocent, his sacred vestments angelically pure.

We are therefore forced to conclude that no list of tortures
and torments existed in printed form for the guidance of interro-
gators! Instead, all that was required was for every Interrogation
Department to supply the tribunal within a specified period with
a stipulated number of rabbits who had confessed everything.
And it was simply stated, orally but often, that any measures and
means employed were good, since they were being used for a
lofty purpose; that no interrogator would be made to answer for
the death of an accused; and that the prison doctor should inter-
fere as little as possible with the course of the investigation. In all
probability, they exchanged experiences in comradely fashion;
“they learned from the most successful workers.” Then, too,
“material rewards” were offered—higher pay for night work,
bonus pay for fast work—and there were also definite warnings
that interrogators who could not cope with their tasks . . . Even
the chief of some provincial NKVD administration, if some sort
of mess developed, could show Stalin his hands were clean: he
had issued no direct instructions to use torture! But at the same
time he had ensured that torture would be used!

The Interrogation | 103

Understanding that their superiors were taking precautions for
self-protection, some of the rank-and-file interrogators—not,
however, those who drank like maniacs—tried to start off with
milder methods, and even when they intensified them, they tried
to avoid those that left obvious marks: an eye gouged out, an
ear torn off, a backbone broken, even bruises all over the body.

That is why in 1937 we observe no general consistency of
methods—except for enforced sleeplessness—in the administra-
tions of the various provinces, or for that matter among the differ-
ent interrogators of a single administration.”

What they did have in common, however, was that they gave
precedence to the so-called light methods (we will see what they
were immediately). This way was sure. Indeed, the actual bound-
aries of human equilibrium are very narrow, and it is not really
necessary. to use a rack or hot coals to drive the average human
being out of his mind.

Let us try to list some of the simplest methods which break
the will and the character of the prisoner without leaving marks
on his body.

Let us begin with psychological methods. These methods have
enormous and even annihilating impact on rabbits who have never
been prepared for prison suffering. And it isn’t easy even for a
person who holds strong convictions.

1. First of all: night. Why is it that all the main work of
breaking down human souls went on at night? Why, from their
very earliest years, did the Organs select the night? Because at
night, the prisoner torn from sleep, even though he has not yet
been tortured by sleeplessness, lacks his normal daytime equani-
mity and common sense. He is more vulnerable.

2. Persuasion in a sincere tone is the very simplest method.
Why play at cat and mouse, so to speak? After all, having spent
some time among others undergoing interrogation, the prisoner
has come to see what the situation is. And so the interrogator
says to him in a lazily friendly way: “Look, you’re going to get
a prison term whatever happens. But if you resist, you'll croak
right here in prison, you'll lose your health. But if you go to
camp, you'll have fresh air and sunlight. . . . So why not sign
right now?” Very logical. And those who agree and sign are

10. It is common talk that Rostov-on-the-Don and Krasnodar were particu-
larly distinguished for the cruelty of their tortures, but this has not been proved.

104 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

smart, if . . . if the matter concerns only themselves! But that’s
rarely so. A struggle is inevitable.

Another variant of persuasion is particularly appropriate to
the Party member. “If there are shortages and even famine in
the country, then you as a Bolshevik have to make up your mind:
can you admit that the whole Party is to blame? Or the whole
Soviet government?” “No, of course not!” the director of the
flax depot hastened to reply. “Then be brave, and shoulder the
blame yourself!” And he did!

3. Foul language is not a clever method, but it can have a
powerful impact on people who are well brought up, refined,
delicate. I know of two cases involving priests, who capitulated
to foul language alone. One of them, in the Butyrki in 1944, was
being interrogated by a woman. At first when he’d come back
to our cell he couldn’t say often enough how polite she was. But
once he came back very despondent, and for a long time he
refused to tell us how, with her legs crossed high, she had begun
to curse. (I regret that I cannot cite one of her little phrases
here. )

4. Psychological contrast was sometimes effective: sudden
reversals of tone, for example. For a whole or part of the inter-
rogation period, the interrogator would be extremely friendly,
addressing the prisoner formally by first name and patronymic,
and promising everything. Suddenly he would brandish a paper-
weight and shout: “Foo, you rat! [ll put nine grams of lead in
your skull!” And he would advance on the accused, clutching
hands outstretched as if to grab him by the hair, fingernails like
needles. (This worked very, very well with women prisoners.)

Or as a variation on this: two interrogators would take turns.
One would shout and bully. The other would be friendly, almost
gentle. Each time the accused entered the office he would tremble
—which would it be? He wanted to do everything to please the
gentle one because of his different manner, even to the point of
signing and confessing to things that had never happened.

5. Preliminary humiliation was another approach. In the
famous cellars of the Rostov-on-the-Don GPU (House 33),
which were lit by lenslike insets of thick glass in the sidewalk
above the former storage basement, prisoners awaiting inter-
rogation were made to lie face down for several hours in the
main corridor and forbidden to raise their heads or make a

The Interrogation | 105

sound. They lay this way, like Moslems at prayer, until the
guard touched a shoulder and took them off to interrogation.
Another case: At the Lubyanka, Aleksandra O va refused
to give the testimony demanded of her. She was transferred to
Lefortovo. In the admitting office, a woman jailer ordered her to
undress, allegedly for a medical examination, took away her
clothes, and locked her in a “box” naked. At that point the men
jailers began to peer through the peephole and to appraise her
female attributes with loud laughs. If one were systematically to
question former prisoners, many more such examples would
certainly emerge. They all had but a single purpose: to dis-
hearten and humiliate.

6. Any method of inducing extreme confusion in the accused
might be employed. Here is how F.I.V. from Krasnogorsk, Mos-
cow Province, was interrogated. (This was reported by I. A.
P ev.) During the interrogation, the interrogator, a woman,
undressed in front of him by stages (a striptease! ), all the time
continuing the interrogation as if nothing were going on. She
walked about the room and came close to him and tried to get
him to give in. Perhaps this satisfied some personal quirk in her,
but it may also have been cold-blooded calculation, an attempt
to get the accused so muddled that he would sign. And she was
in no danger. She had her pistol, and she had her alarm bell.

7. Intimidation was very widely used and very varied. It was
often accompanied by enticement and by promises which were, of
course, false. In 1924: “If you don’t confess, you'll go to the
Solovetsky Islands. Anybody who confesses is turned loose.” In
1944: “Which camp you'll be sent to depends on us. Camps are
different. We’ve got hard-labor camps now. If you confess, you'll
go to an easy camp. If you're stubborn, you'll get twenty-five
years in handcuffs in the mines!” Another form of intimidation
was threatening a prisoner with a prison worse than the one he
was in. “If you keep on being stubborn, we'll send you to
Lefortovo” (if you are in the Lubyanka), “to Sukhanovka” (if
you are at Lefortovo). “They'll find another way to talk to you
there.” You have already gotten used to things where you are;
the regimen seems to be not so bad; and what kind of torments
await you elsewhere? Yes, and you also have to be transported
there. .. . Should you give in?

Intimidation worked beautifully on those who had not yet

106 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

been arrested but had simply received an official summons to the
Bolshoi Dom—the Big House. He (or she) still had a lot to lose.
He (or she) was frightened of everything—that they wouldn't
let him (or her) out today, that they would confiscate his (or
her) belongings or apartment. He would be ready to give all
kinds of testimony and make all kinds of concessions in order to
avoid these dangers. She, of course, would be ignorant of the
Criminal Code, and, at the very least, at the start of the question-
ing they would push a sheet of paper in front of her with a fake
citation from the Code: “I have been warned that for giving false
testimony . . . five years of imprisonment.” (In actual fact, under
Article 95, it is two years.) “For refusal to give testimony—five
years .. .” (In actual fact, under Article 92, it is up to three
months.) Here, then, one more of the interrogator’s basic methods
has entered the picture and will continue to re-enter it.

8. The lie. We lambs were forbidden to lie, but the inter-
rogator could tell all the lies he felt like. Those articles of the law
did not apply to him. We had even lost the yardstick with which
to gauge: what does he get for lying? He could confront us with
as many documents as he chose, bearing the forged signatures
of our kinfolk and friends—and it would be just a skillful inter-
rogation technique.

Intimidation through enticement and lies was the fundamental
method for bringing pressure on the relatives of the arrested per-
son when they were called in to give testimony. “If you don’t tell
us such and such” (whatever was being asked), “it’s going to be
the worse for him. . . . You'll be destroying him completely.”
(How hard for a mother to hear that!)™ “Signing this paper”
(pushed in front of the relatives) “is the only way you can save
him” (destroy him).

9. Playing on one’s affection for those one loved was a game
that worked beautifully on the accused as well. It was the most
effective of all methods of intimidation. One could break even
a totally fearless person through his concern for those he loved.
(Oh, how foresighted was the saying: “A man’s family are his

11. Under the harsh laws of the Tsarist Empire, close relatives could refuse
to testify. And even if they gave testimony at a preliminary investigation, they
could choose to repudiate it and refuse to permit it to be used in court. And,

curiously enough, kinship or acquaintance with a criminal was never in itself
considered evidence.

The Interrogation | 107

enemies.”) Remember the Tatar who bore his sufferings—his
own and those of his wife—but could not endure his daughter’s!
In 1930, Rimalis, a woman interrogator, used to threaten: “We’ll
arrest your daughter and lock her in a cell with syphilitics!” And
that was a woman!

They would threaten to arrest everyone you loved. Sometimes
this would be done with sound effects: Your wife has already
been arrested, but her further fate depends on you. They are
questioning her in the next room—just listen! And through the
wall you can actually hear a woman weeping and screaming.
(After all, they all sound alike; you’re hearing it through a wall;
and you’re under terrific strain and not in a state to play the
expert on voice identification. Sometimes they simply play a
recording of the voice of a “typical wife”—soprano or contralto
—a labor-saving device suggested by some inventive genius. )
And then, without fakery, they actually show her to you through
a glass door, as she walks along in silence, her head bent in
grief. Yes! Your own wife in the corridors of State Security! You
have destroyed her by your stubbornness! She has already been
arrested! (In actual fact, she has simply been summoned in
connection with some insignificant procedural question and sent
into the corridor at just the right moment, after being told:
“Don’t raise your head, or you'll be kept here!”) Or they give
you a letter to read, and the handwriting is exactly like hers: “I
renounce you! After the filth they have told me about you, I
don’t need you any more!” (And since such wives do exist in
our country, and such letters as well, you are left to ponder in
your heart: Is that the kind of wife she really is?)

The interrogator Goldman (in 1944) was trying to extort
testimony against other people from V. A. Korneyeva with the
threat: “We’ll confiscate your house and toss your old women
into the street.” A woman of deep convictions, and firm in her
faith, Korneyeva had no fear whatever for herself. She was pre-
pared to suffer. But, given our laws, Goldman’s threats were
all too real, and she was in torment over the fate of her loved
ones. When, by morning, after a night of tearing up rejected
depositions, Goldman began to write a fourth version accusing
Korneyeva alone, she signed it happily and with a feeling of
spiritual victory. We fail to hang on to the basic human instinct

108 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

to prove our innocence when falsely accused. How can we
there? We were even glad when we succeeded in taking all the
guilt on our own shoulders.”

Just as there is no classification in nature with rigid boundar-
ies, it is impossible rigidly to separate psychological methods
from physical ones. Where, for example, should we classify the
following amusement?

10. Sound effects: The accused is made to stand twenty to
twenty-five feet away and is then forced to speak more and more
loudly and to repeat everything. This is not easy for someone
already weakened to the point of exhaustion. Or two mega-
phones are constructed of rolled-up cardboard, and two inter-
rogators, coming close to the prisoner, bellow in both ears:
“Confess, you rat!” The prisoner is deafened; sometimes he actu-
ally loses his sense of hearing. But this method is uneconomical.
The fact is that the interrogators like some diversion in their
monotonous work, and so they vie in thinking up new ideas.

11. Tickling: This is also a diversion. The prisoner’s arms and
legs are bound or held down, and then the inside of his nose is
tickled with a feather. The prisoner writhes; it feels as though
someone were drilling into his brain.

12. A cigarette is put out on the accused’s skin (already
mentioned above).

13. Light effects involve the use of an extremely bright electric
light in the small, white-walled cell or “box” in which the ac-
cused is being held—a light which is never extinguished. (The
electricity saved by the economies of schoolchildren and house-
wives!) Your eyelids become inflamed, which is very painful. And
then in the interrogation room searchlights are again directed into
your eyes.

14. Here is another imaginative trick: On the eve of May 1,
1933, in the Khabarovsk GPU, for twelve hours—all night—
Chebotaryev was not interrogated, no, but was simply kept in a
continual state of being led to interrogation. “Hey, you—hands

12. Today she says: “After eleven years, during rehabilitation proceedings
they let me reread those ‘depositions,’ and I was gripped by a feeling of spiritual
nausea. What was there to be proud of?” I myself, during the rehabilitation
period, felt the very same way on hearing excerpts from my earlier depositions.
As the saying goes: They bent me into a bow, and I became someone else. I
did not recognize myself—how could I have signed them and still think I had
not gotten off too badly?

The Interrogation | 109

behind your back!” They led him out of the cell, up the stairs
quickly, into the interrogator’s office. The guard left. But the
interrogator, without asking one single question, and sometimes
without even allowing Chebotaryev to sit down, would pick up
the telephone: “Take away the prisoner from 107!” And so they
came to get him and took him back to his cell. No sooner had he
lain down on his board bunk than the lock rattled: “Chebotaryev!
To interrogation. Hands behind your back!” And when he got
there: “Take away the prisoner from 107!”

For that matter, the methods of bringing pressure to bear can
begin a long time before the interrogator’s office.

15. Prison begins with the box, in other words, what amounts
to a closet or packing case. The human being who has just been
taken from freedom, still in a state of inner turmoil, ready to
explain, to argue, to struggle, is, when he first sets foot in prison,
clapped into a “box,” which sometimes has a lamp and a place
where he can sit down, but which sometimes is dark and con-
structed in such a way that he can only stand up and even then
is squeezed against the door. And he is held there for several
hours, or for half a day, or a day. During those hours he knows
absolutely nothing! Will he perhaps be confined there all his
life? He has never in his life encountered anything like this, and
he cannot guess at the outcome. Those first hours are passing
when everything inside him is still ablaze from the unstilled
storm in his heart. Some become despondent—and that’s the
time to subject them to their first interrogation. Others become
angry—and that, too, is all to the good, for they may insult the
interrogator right at the start or make a slip, and it will be all the
easier to cook up their case.

16. When boxes were in short supply, they used to have an-
other method. In the Novocherkassk NKVD, Yelena Strutin-
skaya was forced to remain seated on a stool in the corridor for
six days in such a way that she did not lean against anything,
did not sleep, did not fall off, and did not get up from it. Six
days! Just try to sit that way for six hours!

Then again, as a variation, the prisoner can be forced to sit
on a tall chair, of the kind used in laboratories, so that his feet
do not reach the floor. They become very numb in this position.
He is left sitting that way from eight to ten hours.

110 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

Or else, during the interrogation itself, when the prisoner is
out in plain view, he can be forced to sit in this way: as far
forward as possible on the front edge (“Move further forward!
Further still!”) of the chair so that he is under painful pressure
during the entire interrogation. He is not allowed to stir for
several hours. Is that all? Yes, that’s all. Just try it yourself!

17. Depending on local conditions, a divisional pit can be
substituted for the box, as was done in the Gorokhovets army
camps during World War II. The prisoner was pushed into such
a pit, ten feet in depth, six and a half feet in diameter; and beneath
the open sky, rain or shine, this pit was for several days both his
cell and his latrine. And ten and a half ounces of bread, and
water, were lowered to him on a cord. Imagine yourself in this
situation just after you’ve been arrested, when you're all in a
boil.

Either identical orders to all Special Branches of the Red
Army or else the similarities of their situations in the field led
to broad use of this method. Thus, in the 36th Motorized In-
fantry Division, a unit which took part in the battle of Khalkhin-
Gol, and which was encamped in the Mongolian desert in 1941,
a newly arrested prisoner was, without explanation, given a
spade by Chief of the Special Branch Samulyev and ordered to
dig a pit the exact dimensions of a grave. (Here is a hybridiza-
tion of physical and psychological methods.) When the prisoner
had dug deeper than his own waist, they ordered him to stop and
sit down on the bottom: his head was no longer visible. One
guard kept watch over several such pits and it was as though he
were surrounded by empty space.** They kept the accused in this
desert with no protection from the Mongolian sun and with no
warm clothing against the cold of the night, but no tortures—
why waste effort on tortures? The ration they gave was three and
a half ounces of bread per day and one glass of water. Lieutenant
Chulpenyev, a giant, a boxer, twenty-one years old, spent a
month imprisoned this way. Within ten days he was swarming
with lice. After fifteen days he was summoned to interrogation
for the first time.

13. This, evidently, is a Mongolian theme. In the magazine Niva (March 15,
1914, p. 218) there is a drawing of a Mongolian prison: each prisoner is shut

in a separate trunk with a small opening for his head or for food. A jailer
patrols between the trunks.

The Interrogation | 111

18. The accused could be compelled to stand on his knees—
not in some figurative sense, but literally: on his knees, without
sitting back on his heels, and with his back upright. People
could be compelled to kneel in the interrogator’s office or the
corridor for twelve, or even twenty-four or forty-eight hours.
(The interrogator himself could go home, sleep, amuse himself
in one way or another—this was an organized system; watch was
kept over the kneeling prisoner, and the guards worked in
shifts.)** What kind of prisoner was most vulnerable to such
treatment? One already broken, already inclined to surrender.
It was also a good method to use with women. Ivanov-Razumnik
reports a variation of it: Having set young Lordkipanidze on his
knees, the interrogator urinated in his face! And what happened?
Unbroken by anything else, Lordkipanidze was broken by this.
Which shows that the method also worked well on proud
people. ...

19. Then there is the method of simply compelling a prisoner
to stand there. This can be arranged so that the accused stands
only while being interrogated—because that, too, exhausts and
breaks a person down. It can be set up in another way—-so that
the prisoner sits down during interrogation but is forced to stand
up between interrogations. (A watch is set over him, and the
guards see to it that he doesn’t lean against the wall, and if he
goes to sleep and falls over he is given a kick and straightened
up.) Sometimes even one day of standing is enough to deprive
a person of all his strength and to force him to testify to anything
at all.

20. During all ‘these tortures which involved standing for
three, four, and five days, they ordinarily deprived a person of
water.

The most natural thing of all is to.combine the psychological
and physical methods. It is also natural to combine all the pre-
ceding methods with:

21. Sleeplessness, which they quite failed to appreciate in
medieval times. They did not understand how narrow are the
limits within which a human being can preserve his personality

14. That, after all, is how somebody’s career was launched—standing guard
over a prisoner on his knees. And now, in all probability, that somebody has
attained high rank and his children are already grown up.

112 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

intact. Sleeplessness (yes, combined with standing, thirst, bright
light, terror, and the unknown—what other tortures are
needed!?) befogs the reason, undermines the will, and the human
being ceases to be himself, to be his own “I.” (As in Chekhov’s
“I Want to Sleep,” but there it was much easier, for there the girl
could lie down and slip into lapses of consciousness, which even in
just a minute would revive and refresh the brain.) A person
deprived of sleep acts half-unconsciously or altogether uncon-
sciously, so that his testimony cannot be held against him.*

They used to say: “You are not truthful in your testimony,
and therefore you will not be allowed to sleep!” Sometimes, as
a refinement, instead of making the prisoner stand up, they made
him sit down on a soft sofa, which made him want to sleep all
the more. (The jailer on duty sat next to him on the same sofa
and kicked him every time his eyes began to shut.) Here is how
one victim—who had just sat out days in a box infested with
bedbugs—describes his feelings after this torture: “Chill from
great loss of blood. Irises of the eyes dried out as if someone
were holding a red-hot iron in front of them. Tongue swollen
from thirst and prickling as from a hedgehog at the slightest
movement. Throat racked by spasms of swallowing.”*®

Sleeplessness was a great form of torture: it left no visible
marks and could not provide grounds for complaint even if an
inspection—something unheard of anyway—were to strike on
the morrow.*" |

“They didn’t let you sleep? Well, after all, this is not supposed
to be a vacation resort. The Security officials were awake too!”
(They would catch up on their sleep during the day.) One can
say that sleeplessness became the universal method in the Organs.
From being one among many tortures, it became an integral
part of the system of State Security; it was the cheapest possible

15. Just picture a foreigner, who knows no Russian, in this muddled state, being
given something to sign. Under these conditions the Bavarian Jupp Aschen-
brenner signed a document admitting that he had worked on wartime gas vans.
It was not until 1954, in camp, that he was finally able to prove that at the time
he had been in Munich, studying to become an electric welder.

16. G. M——ch.

17. Inspection, by the way, was so totally impossible and had so emphatically
never taken place that in 1953, when real inspectors entered the cell of former
Minister of State Security Abakumov, himself a prisoner by that time, he roared
with laughter, thinking their appearance was a trick intended to confuse him.

The Interrogation | 113

method and did not require the posting of sentries. In all the
interrogation prisons the prisoners were forbidden to sleep even
one minute from reveille till taps. (In Sukhanovka and several
other prisons used specifically for interrogation, the cot was
folded into the wall during the day; in others, the prisoners were
simply forbidden to lie down, and even to close their eyes while
seated.) Since the major interrogations were all conducted at
night, it was automatic: whoever was undergoing interrogation
got no sleep for at least five days and nights. (Saturday and Sun-
day nights, the interrogators themselves tried to get some rest.)

22. The above method was further implemented by an as-
sembly line of interrogators. Not only were you not allowed to
sleep, but for three or four days shifts of interrogators kept up a
continuous interrogation.

23. The bedbug-infested box has already been mentioned. In
the dark closet made of wooden planks, there were hundreds,
maybe even thousands, of bedbugs, which had been allowed to
multiply. The guards removed the prisoner’s jacket or field
shirt, and immediately the hungry bedbugs assaulted him, crawl-
ing onto him from the walls or falling off the ceiling. At first he
waged war with them strenuously, crushing them on his body
and on the walls, suffocated by their stink. But after several
hours he weakened and let them drink his blood without a
murmur.

24. Punishment cells. No matter how hard it was in the
ordinary cell, the punishment cells were always worse. And on
return from there the ordinary cell always seemed like paradise.
In the punishment cell a human being was systematically worn
down by starvation and also, usually, by cold. (In Sukhanovka
Prison there were also hot punishment cells.) For example, the
Lefortovo punishment cells were entirely unheated. There were
radiators in the corridor only, and in this “heated” corridor the
guards on duty walked in felt boots and padded jackets. The
prisoner was forced to undress down to his underwear, and
sometimes to his undershorts, and he was forced to spend from
three to five days in the punishment cell without moving (since
it was so confining ). He received hot gruel on the third day only.
For the first few minutes you were convinced you’d not be able
to last an hour. But, by some miracle, a human being would in-

114 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

deed sit out his five days, perhaps. acquiring in the course of it
an illness that would last him the rest of his life.

There were various aspects to punishment cells—as, for in-
stance, dampness and water. In the Chernovtsy Prison after the
war, Masha G. was kept barefooted for two hours and up to her
ankles in icy water—confess! (She was eighteen years old, and
how she feared for her feet! She was going to have to live with
them a long time.)

25. Should one consider it a variation of the punishment cell
when a prisoner was locked in an alcove? As long ago as 1933
this was one of the ways they tortured S. A. Chebotaryev in the -
Khabarovsk GPU. They locked him naked in a concrete alcove
in such a way that he could neither bend his knees, nor straighten
up and change the position of his arms, nor turn his head. And
that was not all! They began to drip cold water onto his scalp—
a classic torture—which then ran down his body in rivulets.
They did not inform him, of course, that this would go on for
only twenty-four hours. It was awful enough at any rate for him
to lose consciousness, and he was discovered the next day ap-
parently dead. He came to on a hospital cot. They had brought
him out of his faint with spirits of ammonia, caffeine, and body
massage. At first he had no recollection of where he had been,
or what had happened. For a whole month he was useless even
for interrogation. (We may be so bold as to assume that this
alcove and dripping device had not been devised for Chebotaryev
alone. In 1949 my Dnepropetrovsk acquaintance had been
similarly confined, without the dripping attachment, however.
On a line joining Khabarovsk and Dnepropetrovsk, and over a
period of sixteen years, were there not other such points as
well? )

26. Starvation has already been mentioned in combination
with other methods. Nor was it an unusual method: to starve the
prisoner into confession. Actually, the starvation technique, like
interrogation at night, was an integral element in the entire
system of coercion. The miserly prison bread ration, amounting
to ten and a half ounces in the peacetime year of 1933, and to |
one pound in 1945 in the Lubyanka, and permitting or pro-
hibiting food parcels from one’s family and access to the commis-
sary, were universally applied to everyone. But there was also

The Interrogation | 115

the technique of intensified hunger: for example, Chulpenyev
was kept for a month on three and a half ounces of bread, after
which—when he had just been brought in from the pit—the
interrogator Sokol placed in front of him a pot of thick borscht,
and half a loaf of white bread sliced diagonally. (What does it
matter, one might ask, how it was sliced? But Chulpenyev even
today will insist that it was really sliced very attractively.) How-
ever, he was not given a thing to eat. How ancient it all is, how
medieval, how primitive! The only thing new about it was that
it was applied in a socialist society! Others, too, tell about such
tricks. They were often tried. But we are going to cite another
case involving Chebotaryev because it combined so many
methods. They put him in the interrogator’s office for seventy-
two hours, and the only thing he was allowed was to be taken to
the toilet. For the rest, they allowed him neither food nor drink
—even though there was water in a carafe right next to him. Nor
was he permitted to sleep. Throughout there were three inter-
rogators in the office, working in shifts. One kept writing some-
thing—silently, without disturbing the prisoner. The second
slept on the sofa, and the third walked around the room, and as
soon as Chebotaryev fell asleep, beat him instantly. Then they
switched roles. (Maybe they themselves were being punished
for failure to deliver.) And then, all of a sudden, they brought
Chebotaryev a meal: fat Ukrainian borscht, a chop, fried pota-
toes, and red wine in a crystal carafe. But because Chebotaryev
had had an aversion to alcohol all his life, he refused to drink the
wine, and the interrogator couldn’t go too far in forcing him to,
because that would have spoiled the whole game. After he had
eaten, they said to him: “Now here’s what you have testified to
in the presence of two witnesses. Sign here.” In other words, he
was to sign what had been silently composed by one interrogator
in the presence of another, who had been asleep, and a third,
who had been actively working. On the very first page Che-
botaryev learned he had been on intimate terms with all the
leading Japanese generals and that he had received espionage
assignments from all of them. He began to cross out whole pages.
They beat him up and threw him out. Blaginin, another Chinese
Eastern Railroad man, arrested with him, was put through the
same thing; but he drank the wine and, in a state of pleasant

116 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

intoxication, signed the confession—and was shot. (Even one
tiny glass can have an enormous effect on a famished man—and
that was a whole carafe. )

27. Beatings—of a kind that leave no marks. They use rubber
truncheons, and they use wooden mallets and small sandbags. It
is very, very painful when they hit a bone—for example, an
interrogator’s jackboot on the shin, where the bone lies just
beneath the skin. They beat Brigade Commander Karpunich-
Braven for twenty-one days in a row. And today he says: “Even
after thirty years all my bones ache—and my head too.” In
recollecting his own experience and the stories of others, he
counts up to fifty-two methods of torture. Here is one: They
grip the hand in a special vise so that the prisoner’s palm lies
flat on the desk—and then they hit the joints with the thin edge
of a ruler. And one screams! Should we single out particularly
the technique by which teeth are knocked out? They knocked
out eight of Karpunich’s.”*

As everyone knows, a blow of the fist in the solar plexus,
catching the victim in the middle of a breath, leaves no mark
whatever. The Lefortovo Colonel Sidorov, in the postwar period,
used to take a “penalty kick” with his overshoes at the dangling
genitals of male prisoners. Soccer players who at one time or
another have been hit in the groin by a ball know what that kind
of blow is like. There is no pain comparable to it, and ordinarily
the recipient loses consciousness.*”

28. In the Novorossisk NKVD they invented a machine for
squeezing fingernails. As a result it could be observed later at
transit prisons that many of those from Novorossisk had lost
their fingernails.

29. And what about the strait jacket?

30. And breaking the prisoner's back? (As in that same Kha-
barovsk GPU in 1933.)

18. In the case of the Secretary of the Karelian Provincial Party Committee,
G. Kupriyanov, arrested in 1949, some of the teeth they knocked out were just
ordinary ones, of no particular account, but others were gold. At first they
gave him a receipt that said his gold teeth were being kept for him. And then
they caught themselves just in time and took away his receipt.

19. In 1918 the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal convicted the former Tsarist
jailer Bondar. The most extreme measure of his cruelty that was cited was the
accusation that “in one case he had struck a political prisoner with such force
that his eardrum had burst.” (Krylenko, op. cit., p. 16.)

The Interrogation | 117

31. Or bridling (also known as “the swan dive”)? This was
a Sukhanovka method—also used in Archangel, where the in-
terrogator Ivkov applied it in 1940. A long piece of rough
toweling was inserted between the prisoner’s jaws like a bridle;
the ends were then pulled back over his shoulders and tied to his
heels. Just try lying on your stomach like a wheel, with your
spine breaking—and without water and food for two days!*°

Is it necessary to go on with the list? Is there much left to
enumerate? What won’t idle, well-fed, unfeeling people invent?

Brother mine! Do not condemn those who, finding themselves
in such a situation, turned out to be weak and confessed to more
than they should have. . . . Do not be the first to cast a stone
at them.

But here’s the point! Neither these methods nor even the
“lightest” methods of all are needed to wring testimony from the
majority . . . for iron jaws to grip lambs who are unprepared
and longing to return to their warm hearths. The relationship of
forces to situations is too unequal.

Oh, in how new a light does our past life appear when re-
examined in the interrogator’s office: abounding in dangers, like
an African jungle. And we had considered it so simple!

You, A, and your friend, B, have known each other for years
and have complete faith in one another. When you met, you
spoke out boldly about political matters large and small. No one
else was present. There was no one who could have overheard
you. And you have not denounced each other—not at all.

But at this point, for some reason, you, A, have been marked,
hauled out of the herd by the ears, and arrested. And for some
reason—well, maybe not without a denunciation on somebody’s
part, and not without your apprehensions as to the fate of your
loved ones, and not without a certain lack of sleep, and not with-
out a bit of punishment cell—you have decided to write yourself
off but at the same time not to betray anyone else at any price.

You have therefore confessed in four depositions, and signed
them—declaring yourself to be a sworn enemy of Soviet power

20. N.K.G.

118 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

—because you used to tell jokes about the Leader, because you
thought there should be a choice of candidates at elections, be-
cause you went into the voting booth only in order to cross out
the name of the only candidate and would have done so except
there was no ink in the inkwell, and because there was a 16-
meter band on your radio on which you tried to catch parts of
Western broadcasts through the jamming. Your own tenner has
been assured, yet your ribs have remained whole, and so far
you have not caught pneumonia. You have not sold. anyone out;
and it seems to you’ that you have worked things out sensibly.
You have already informed your cellmates that in your opinion
your interrogation is probably coming to an end.

But lo and behold! Admiring His own handwriting, and with
deliberation, the interrogator begins to fill out. deposition’ No. 5.
Question: Were you friendly with B? Answer: Yes. Question:
Were you frank with him about politics? Answer: No, no, I did
not trust him. Question: But you met often? Answer: Not very.
Question: What does that mean, not very? According to testi-
mony from your neighbors, he was at your house on such and
such a day, and on such and such, and on such and such just
in the past month. Was he? Answer: Maybe. Question: And it
was observed that on these occasions, as always, you did not
drink, you did not make any noise, you spoke very quietly, and
you couldn’t be overheard even in the corridor? (Well, friends,
drink up! Break bottles! Curse at the top of your lungs! On that
basis you will be considered reliable.) Answer: Well, what of
it? Question: And you used to visit him too. And you said to him
on the phone, for example: “We spent such an interesting even-
ing.” Then they saw you on the street at an intersection. You
were standing there together in the cold for half an hour, and
you both had gloomy faces and dissatisfied expressions; in fact,
they even took photographs of you during that meeting. (The
technological resources of agents, my friends, the technology of
agents!) So what did you talk about during these meetings?

What about? That’s a leading question! Your first idea is to
say that you’ve forgotten what you talked about. Are you really
obliged to remember? So! You’ve forgotten your first conversa-
tion. And the second one too? And the third? And even your
interesting evening? And that time at the intersection? And your

The Interrogation | 119

conversations with C? And your conversations with D? No, you
think: “I forgot” is not the way out; you will be unable to
maintain that position. And your mind, still shocked by your
arrest, in the grip of fear, muddled by sleeplessness and hunger,
seeks a way out: how to play it shrewdly in a manner that will
have some verisimilitude and outsmart the interrogator.

What. about? It is fine if you talked about hockey—that,
friends, is in all cases the least troublesome! Or about women,
or even about science. Then you can repeat: what was said.
(Science is not too far removed from hockey, but in our time
everything to do with science is classified information and they
may get you for a violation of the Decree on Revealing State
Secrets.) But what if you did in actual fact talk about the latest
arrests in the city? Or about the collective farms? (Of course,
critically—for who has anything good to say about them?) Or
about reducing the rate of pay for piecework? The fact remains
that you frowned for half an hour at the intersection—what
were you talking about there?

Maybe B has already been arrested. The interrogator assures
you that he has been, and that he has already given evidence
against you, and that they are about to bring him in for a con-
frontation with you. Maybe he is sitting home very calmly and
quietly, but they might very well bring him in for questioning
and then they will find out from him what you were frowning
about for half an hour at that intersection.

At this point, too late, you have come to understand that,
because of the way life is, you and he ought to have reached an
agreement every time you parted and remembered clearly what
you were going to say if you were asked what you had talked
about that day, Then, regardless of interrogations, your testi-
mony and his would agree. But you had not made any such
agreement. You had unfortunately not understood what kind of
a jungle you lived in.

Should you say that you were talking about going on a fishing
trip? But then B might say that there was never any discussion
of fishing, that you talked about correspondence-school courses.
In that case, instead of causing the investigation to ease up a
bit, you would only tie the noose tighter: what about, what
about, what about?

120 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

And the idea flashes through your mind—is it a brilliant or
a fatal one?—that you ought to come as close as you can to the
truth of what was actually said—of course rounding off the
sharp edges and skipping the dangerous parts. After all, people
say that when you lie you should always stay as close to the
truth as possible. And maybe B will guess what’s up and say
approximately the same thing and then your testimony will
coincide in some respects and they will leave you in peace.

Many years later you will come to understand that this was
not really a wise idea, and that it is much smarter to play the
role of someone so improbably imbecile that he can’t remember
one single day of his life even at the risk of being beaten. But you
have been kept awake for three days. You have hardly strength
enough to follow the course of your own thoughts and to main-
tain an imperturbable expression. And you don’t have even a
minute to think things over. Suddenly two interrogators—for
they enjoy visiting one another—are at you: What were you
talking about? What about? What about?

And you testify: We were talking about collective farms—to
the effect that not everything had as yet been set to rights on
them but it soon would be. We talked about the lowering of
piece rates... . And what in particular did you say about them?
That you were delighted they had been reduced? But that wasn’t
the way people normally talked—it was too implausible. And so
as to make it seem an altogether believable conversation, you
concede that you complained just a little that they were putting
on the squeeze a bit with piece rates.

The interrogator writes down the deposition himself, translat-
ing it into his own language: At this meeting we slandered Party
and government policy in the field of wages.

And someday B is going to accuse you: “Oh, you blabber-
mouth, and I said we were making plans to go fishing.”

But you tried to outsmart your interrogator! You have a quick,
abstruse mind. You are an intellectual! And you outsmarted
yourself... .

In Crime and Punishment, Porfiri Petrovich makes a surpris-
ingly astute remark to Raskolnikov, to the effect that he could
have been found out only by someone who had himself gone
through that same cat-and-mouse game—implying, so to speak:
“I don’t even have to construct my own version with you intel-

The Interrogation | 121

lectuals. You will put it together yourselves and bring it to me
all wrapped up.” Yes, that’s so! An intellectual cannot reply
with the delightful incoherence of Chekhov’s “Malefactor.” He
is bound to try to build up in logical form the whole story he is
being accused of, no matter how much falsehood it contains.

But the interrogator-butcher isn’t interested in logic; he
just wants to catch two or three phrases. He knows what he
wants. And as for us—we are totally unprepared for anything.

From childhood on we are educated and trained—for our
own profession; for our civil duties; for military service; to take
care of our bodily needs; to behave well; even to appreciate
beauty (well, this last not really all that much! ). But neither our
education, nor our upbringing, nor our experience prepares us
in the slightest for the greatest trial of our lives: being arrested
for nothing and interrogated about nothing. Novels, plays, films
(their authors should themselves be forced to drink the cup of
Gulag to the bottom!) depict the types one meets in the offices
of interrogators as chivalrous guardians of truth and humani-
tarianism, as our loving fathers. We are exposed to lectures on
everything under the sun—and are even herded in to listen to
them. But no one is going to lecture to us about the true and
extended significance of the Criminal Code; and the codes them-
selves are not on open shelves in our libraries, nor sold at news-
stands; nor do they fall into the hands of the heedless young.

It seems a virtual fairy tale that somewhere, at the ends of
the earth, an accused person can avail himself of a lawyer’s help.
This means having beside you in the most difficult moment of
your life a clear-minded ally who knows the law.

The principle of our interrogation consists further in depriv-
ing the accused of even a knowledge of the law.

An indictment is presented. And here, incidentally, is how
it’s presented: “Sign it.” “It’s not true.” “Sign.” “But Pm not
guilty of anything!” It turns out that you are being indicted
under the provisions of Articles 58-10, Part 2, and 58-11 of the
Criminal Code of the Russian Republic. “Sign!” “But what do
these sections say? Let me read the Code!” “I don’t have it.”
“Well, get it from your department head!” “He doesn’t have it
either. Sign!” “But I want to see it.” “You are not supposed to
see it. It isn’t written for you but for us. You don’t need it. Pll
tell you what it says: these sections spell out exactly what you

122 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

are guilty of. And anyway, at this point your signature doesn’t
mean that you agree with the indictment but that you’ve read it,
that it’s been presented to you.”

All of a sudden, a new combination of letters, UPK, flashes
by on one of the pieces of paper. Your sense of caution is
aroused. What’s the difference between the UPK and the UK—
the Criminal Code? If you’ve been lucky enough to catch the
interrogator when he is in a good mood, he will explain it to
you: the UPK is the Code of Criminal Procedure. What? This
means that there are two distinct codes, not just one, of whose
contents you are completely ignorant even as you are being
trampled under their provisions.

Since that time ten years have passed; then fifteen. The grass
has grown thick over the grave of my youth. I served out my
term and even “eternal exile” as well. And nowhere—neither in
the “cultural education” sections of the camps, nor in district
libraries, nor -even in medium-sized cities, have I seen with my
own eyes, held in my own hands, been able to buy, obtain, or
even ask for the Code of Soviet law!”

And of the hundreds of prisoners I knew who had gone
through interrogation and trial, and more than once too, who
had served sentences in camp and in exile, none had ever seen
the Code or held it in his hand!

It was only when both codes were thirty-five years old and on
the point of being replaced by new ones that I saw them, two
little paperback brothers, the UK or Criminal Code, and the
UPK or Code of Criminal Procedure, on a newsstand in the
Moscow subway (because they were outdated, it had been de-
cided to release them for general circulation).

I read them today touched with emotion. For example, the
UPK—the Code of Criminal Procedure:

“Article 136: The interrogator does not have the right to
extract testimony -or a confession from an accused by means of
compulsion and threats.” (It was as though they had foreseen
it!)

21. Those familiar with our atmosphere of suspicion will understand why it
was impossible to ask for the Code in a people’s court-or in the District Execu-
tive Committee. Your interest in the Code would be an extraordinary phenome-

non: you must either be preparing to commit a crime or be trying to cover your
tracks.

The Interrogation | 123

“Article 111: The interrogator is obliged to establish clearly
all the relevant facts, both those tending toward acquittal and
any which might lessen the accused’s measure of guilt.”

But it was I who helped establish Soviet power in October!
It was I who shot Kolchak! I took part in the dispossession of
the kulaks! I saved the state ten million rubles in lowered pro-
duction costs! I was wounded twice in the war! I have three
orders and decorations. |

“You're not being tried for that!” History . . . the bared teeth of
the interrogator: “Whatever good you may have done has noth-
ing to do with the case.”

“Article 139: The accused has the right to set forth his testi-
mony in his own hand, and to demand the right to make correc-
tions in the deposition written by the interrogator.”

Oh, if we had only known that in time! But what I should
say is: If that were only the way it really was! We were always
vainly: imploring the interrogator not to write “my repulsive,
slanderous fabrications” instead of “my mistaken statements,” or
not to write “our underground weapons arsenal” instead of “my
rusty Finnish knife.”

If only the defendants had first been taught some prison
science! If only interrogation had been run through first in re-
hearsal, and only afterward for real... . They didn’t, after all,
play that interrogation game with the second-termers of 1948:
it would have gotten them nowhere. But newcomers had no ex-
perience, no knowledge! And there was no one from whom to
seek advice.

The loneliness of the accused! That was one more factor in
the success of unjust interrogation! The entire apparatus threw
its full weight on one lonely and inhibited will. From the moment
of his arrest and throughout the entire shock period of the inter-
rogation the prisoner was, ideally, to be kept entirely alone. In
his cell,.in the corridor, on the stairs, in the offices, he was not
supposed to encounter others like himself, in order to avoid the
risk of his gleaning a bit of sympathy, advice, support from
someone’s smile or glance. The Organs did everything to blot out
for him his future and distort his present: to lead him to believe
that his friends and family had all been arrested and that material
proof of his guilt had been found. It was their habit to exagger-

124 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

ate their power to destroy him and those he loved as well as
their authority to pardon (which the Organs didn’t even have).
They pretended that there was some connection between the
sincerity of a prisoner’s “repentance” and a reduction in his sen-
tence or an easing of the camp regimen. (No such connection ever
existed.) While the prisoner was still in a state of shock and tor-
ment and totally beside himself, they tried to get from him very
quickly as many irreparably damaging items of evidence as pos-
sible and to implicate with him as many totally innocent persons
as possible. Some defendants became so depressed in these circum-
stances that they even asked not to have the depositions read to
them. They could not stand hearing them. They asked merely
to be allowed to sign them, just to sign and get it over with.
Only after all this was over would the prisoner be released from
solitary into a large cell, where, in belated desperation, he would
discover and count over his mistakes one by one.

How was it possible not to make mistakes in such a duel? Who
could have failed to make a mistake?

We said that “ideally he was to be kept alone.” However, in the
overcrowded prisons of 1937, and, for that matter, of 1945 as
well, this ideal of solitary confinement for a newly arrested de-
fendant could not be attained. Almost from his first hours, the
prisoner was in fact in a terribly overcrowded common cell.

But there were virtues to this arrangement, too, which more
than made up for its flaws. The overcrowding of the cells not only
took the place of the tightly confined solitary “box” but also as-
sumed the character of a first-class torture in itself . . . one that
was particularly useful because it continued for whole days and
weeks—with no effort on the part of the interrogators. The
prisoners tortured the prisoners! The jailers pushed so many
prisoners into the cell that not every one had even a piece of floor;
some were sitting on others’ feet, and people walked on people
and couldn’t even move about at all. Thus, in the Kishinev KPZ’s
—Cells for Preliminary Detention—in 1945, they pushed eigh-
teen prisoners into a cell designed for the solitary confinement
of one person; in Lugansk in 1937 it was fifteen.” And in 1938

22. And the interrogation there lasted eight to ten months at a time. “Maybe
Klim [Voroshilov] had one of these to himself,” said the fellows there. (Was
he, in fact, ever imprisoned?)

The Interrogation | 125

Ivanov-Razumnik found one hundred forty prisoners in a standard
Butyrki cell intended for twenty-five—with toilets so overbur-
dened that prisoners were taken to the toilet only once a day,
sometimes at night; and the same thing was true of their outdoor
walk as well.?? It was Ivanov-Razumnik who in the Lubyanka
reception “kennel” calculated that for weeks at a time there were
three persons for each square yard of floor space (just as an
experiment, try to fit three people into that space! ).** In this “ken-
nel” there was neither ventilation nor a window, and the prison-
ers’ body heat and breathing raised the temperature to 40 or 45
degrees Centigrade—104 to 113 degrees Fahrenheit—and every-
one sat there in undershorts with their winter clothing piled
beneath them. Their naked bodies were pressed against one an-
other, and they got eczema from one another’s sweat. They sat
like that for weeks at a time, and were given neither fresh air nor
water—except for gruel and tea in the morning.”

And if at the same time the latrine bucket replaced all other
types of toilet (or if, on the other hand, there was no latrine
bucket for use between trips to an outside toilet, as was the case
in several Siberian prisons); and if four people ate from one
bowl, sitting on each other’s knees; and if someone was hauled
out for interrogation, and then someone else was pushed in
beaten up, sleepless, and broken; and if the appearance of such
broken men was more persuasive than any threats on the part of
the interrogators; and if, by then, death and any camp whatever
seemed easier to a prisoner who had been left unsummoned for
months than his tormented current situation—perhaps this really

23. That same year in the Butyrki, those newly arrested, who had already
been processed through the bath and the boxes, sat on the stairs for several days
at a stretch, waiting for departing prisoner transports to leave and release space
in the cells. T. v had been imprisoned in the Butyrki seven years earlier, in
1931, and says that it was overcrowded under the bunks and that prisoners lay
on the asphalt floor. I myself was imprisoned seven years later, in 1945, and
it was just the same. But recently I received from M. K. B——ch valuable
personal testimony about overcrowding in the Butyrki in 1918. In October of

that year—during the second month of the Red Terror—it was so full that they
even set up a cell for seventy women in the laundry. When, then, was the
Butyrki not crowded?

24. But this, too, is no miracle: in the Vladimir Internal Prison in 1948,
thirty people had to stand in a cell ten feet by ten feet in size! (S. Potapov.)

25. By and large there is a good deal in Ivanov-Razumnik’s book that is
superficial and personal, and there are many exhaustingly monotonous jokes.

But the real life of the cells in the 1937-1938 period is very well described
there.

126 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

did replace the theoretically ideal isolation in solitary. And you
could not always decide in such a porridge of people with whom
to be forthright; and you could not always find someone from
whom to seek advice. And you would believe in the tortures and
beatings not when the interrogator threatened you with them but
when you saw their results on other prisoners.

You could learn from those who had suffered that they could
give you a salt-water douche in the throat and then leave you in
a box for a day tormented by thirst (Karpunich). Or that they
might scrape the skin off a man’s back with a grater till it bled
and then oil it with turpentine. (Brigade Commander Rudolf
Pintsov underwent both treatments. In addition, they pushed
needles under his nails, and poured water into him to the bursting
point—demanding that he confess to having wanted to. turn his
brigade of tanks against the government during the November
parade.)?* And from Aleksandrov, the former head of the Arts
Section of the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with
Foreign Countries, who has a broken spinal column which tilts
to one side, and who cannot control his tear ducts and thus cannot
stop crying, one can learn how Abakumov himself could beat—in
1948.

Yes, yes, Minister of State Security Abakumov himself did not
by any means spurn such menial labor. (A Suvorov at the head
of his troops!) He was not averse to taking a rubber truncheon in
his hands every once in a while. And his deputy Ryumin was even
more willing. He did this at Sukhanovka in the “Generals’ ” inter-
rogation office. The office had imitation-walnut paneling on the
walls, silk portieres at the windows and doors, and a great Persian
carpet on the floor. In order not to spoil all this beauty, a dirty run-
ner bespattered with blood was rolled out on top of the carpet when
a prisoner was being beaten. When Ryumin was doing the beat-
ing, he was assisted not by some ordinary guard but by a colonel.
“And so,” said Ryumin politely, stroking his rubber truncheon,
which was four centimeters—an inch and a half—thick, “you
have survived trial by sleeplessness with honor.” (Alexander D.

26. In actual fact, he did lead his brigade at the parade, but for some reason
he did not turn it against the government. But this was not taken into account.
However, after these most varied tortures, he was sentenced to ten years by
the OSO. To that degree, the gendarmes themselves had no faith in their achieve-
ments.

The Interrogation | 127

had cleverly managed to last a month “without sleep” by sleeping
while he was standing up.) “So now we will try the club. Prisoners
can’t take more than two or three sessions of this. Let down your
trousers and lie down on the runner.” The colonel sat down on
the prisoner’s back. A.D. was going to count the blows. He didn’t
yet know about a blow from a rubber truncheon on the sciatic
nerve when the buttocks have disappeared as a consequence of
prolonged starvation. The effect is not felt in the place where the
blow is delivered—it explodes inside the head. After the first blow
the victim was mad with pain and broke his nails on the carpet.
Ryumin beat away, trying to hit accurately. The colonel pressed
down on A.D.’s torso—this was just the right sort of work for
three big shoulder-board stars, assisting the all-powerful Ryumin!
(After the beating the prisoner could not walk and, of course, was
not carried. They just dragged him along the floor. What was left
of his buttocks was soon so swollen that he could not button his
trousers, and yet there were practically no scars. He was hit by a
violent case of diarrhea, and, sitting there on the latrine bucket
in solitary, A.D. guffawed. He went through a second and a third
session, and his skin cracked, and Ryumin went wild, and started
to beat him on the stomach, breaking through the intestinal wall
and creating an enormous hernia through which A.D.’s intestines
protruded. The prisoner was taken off to the Butyrki hospital
with a case of peritonitis, and for the time being their attempts to
compel him to commit a foul deed were suspended. )

That is how they can torture you too! After that it could seem a
simple fatherly caress when the Kishinev interrogator Danilov
beat Father Viktor Shipovalnikov across the back of the head
with a poker and pulled him by his long hair. (It is very conven-
ient to drag a priest around in that fashion; ordinary laymen can
be dragged by the beard from one corner of the office to the
other. And Richard Ohola—a Finnish Red Guard, and a partici-
pant in the capture of British agent Sidney Reilly, and com-
mander of a company during the suppression of the Kronstadt
revolt—was lifted up with pliers first by one end of his great
mustaches and then by the other, and held for ten minutes with
his feet off the floor. )

But the most awful thing they can do with you is this: undress
you from the waist down, place you on your back on the floor,

128 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

pull your legs apart, seat assistants on them (from the glorious
corps of sergeants!) who also hold down your arms; and then the
interrogator (and women interrogators have not shrunk from
this) stands between your legs and with the toe of his boot (or
of her shoe) gradually, steadily, and with ever greater pressure
crushes against the floor those organs which once made you a
man. He looks into your eyes and repeats and repeats his ques-
tions or the betrayal he is urging on you. If he does not press
down too quickly or just a shade too powerfully, you still have
fifteen seconds left in which to scream that you will confess to
everything, that you are ready to see arrested all twenty of those
people he’s been demanding of you, or that you will slander in the
newspapers everything you hold holy... .

And may you be judged by God, but not by people... .

“There is no way out! You have to confess to everything!”
whisper the stoolies who have been planted in the cell.

“It’s a simple question: hang onto your health!” say people
with common sense.

“You can’t get new teeth,” those who have already lost them
nod at you.

“They are going to convict you in any case, whether you con-
fess or whether you don’t,” conclude those who have got to the
bottom of things.

“Those who don’t sign get shot!” prophesies someone else in
the corner. “Out of vengeance! So as not to risk any leaks about
how they conduct interrogations.”

“And if you die in the interrogator’s office, they'll tell your
relatives you’ve been sentenced to camp without the right of
correspondence. And then just let them look for you.” |

If you are an orthodox Communist, then another orthodox
Communist will sidle up to you, peering about with hostile sus-
picion, and he'll begin to whisper in your ear so that the un-
initiated cannot overhear:

“Its our duty to support Soviet interrogation. It’s a combat
situation. We ourselves are to blame. We were too softhearted;
and now look at all the rot that has multiplied in the country.
There is a vicious secret war going on. Even here we are sur-
rounded by enemies. Just listen to what they are saying! The

The Interrogation | 129

Party is not obliged to account for what it does to every single
one of us—to explain the whys and wherefores. If they ask us to,
that means we should sign.”

And another orthodox Communist sidles up:

“I signed denunciations against thirty-five people, against all
my acquaintances. And I advise you too: Drag along as many
names as you can in your wake, as many as you can. That way it
will become obvious that the whole thing is an absurdity and
they'll let everyone out!”

But that is precisely what the Organs need. The conscientious-
ness of the orthodox Communist and the purpose of the NKVD
naturally coincide. Indeed, the NKVD needs just that arched
fan of names, that fat multiplication of them. That is the mark of
quality of their work, and these are also new patches of woods in
which to set out snares. “Your accomplices, accomplices! Others
who share your views!” That is what they keep pressing to shake
out of everyone. They say that R. Ralov named Cardinal Riche-
lieu as one of his accomplices and that the Cardinal was in fact
so listed in his depositions—and no one was astonished by this
until Ralov was questioned about it at his rehabilitation proceed-
ings in 1956. |

Apropos of the orthodox Communists, Stalin was necessary,
for such a purge as that, yes, but a Party like that was necessary
too: the majority of those in power, up to the very moment of
their own arrest, were pitiless in arresting others, obediently
destroyed their peers in accordance with those same instructions
and handed over to retribution any friend or comrade-in-arms of
yesterday. And all the big Bolsheviks, who now wear martyrs’
halos, managed to be the executioners of other Bolsheviks (not
even taking into account how all of them in the first place had
been the executioners of non-Communists). Perhaps 1937 was
needed in order to show how little their whole ideology was worth
—that ideology of which they boasted so enthusiastically, turning
Russia upside down, destroying its foundations, trampling every-
thing it held sacred underfoot, that Russia where they themselves
had never been threatened by such retribution. The victims of
the Bolsheviks from 1918 to 1946 never conducted themselves

130 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

so despicably as the leading Bolsheviks when the lightning struck
them. If you study in detail the whole history of the arrests and
trials of 1936 to 1938, the principal revulsion you feel is not
against Stalin and his accomplices, but against the humiliatingly
repulsive defendants—nausea at their spiritual baseness after
their former pride and implacability.

So what is the answer? How can you stand your ground when
you are weak and sensitive to pain, when people you love are
still alive, when you are unprepared?

What do you need to make you aironeet than the interrogator
and the whole trap?

From the moment you go to prison you must put your cozy
past firmly behind you. At the very threshold, you must say to
yourself: “My life is over, a little early to be sure, but there’s
nothing to be done about it. I shall never return to freedom. I am
condemned to die—now or a little later. But later on, in truth,
it will be even harder, and so the sooner the better. I no longer
have any property whatsoever. For me those I love have died, and
for them { have died. From today on, my body is useless and
alien to me. Only my spirit and my conscience remain precious
and important to me.’

Confronted by such a prisoner, the mo will tremble.

Only the man who has renounced everything can win that
victory.

But how can one turn one’s body to stone?

Well, they managed to turn some individuals from the Berd-
yayev circle into puppets for a trial, but they didn’t succeed with
Berdyayev. They wanted to drag him into an open trial; they
arrested him twice; and (in 1922) he was subjected to a night
interrogation by Dzerzhinsky himself. Kamenev was there too
(which means that he, too, was not averse to using the Cheka
in an ideological conflict). But Berdyayev did not humiliate him-
self. He did not beg or plead. He set forth firmly those religious
and moral principles which had led him to refuse to accept the
political authority established in Russia. And not only did they
come to the conclusion that he would be useless for a trial, but
they liberated him.

The Interrogation | 131

A human being has a point of view!

N. Stolyarova recalls an old woman who was her neighbor on
the Butyrki bunks in 1937. They kept on interrogating her every
night. Two years earlier, a former Metropolitan of the Orthodox
Church, who had escaped from exile, had spent a night at her
home on his way through Moscow. “But he wasn’t the former
Metropolitan, he was the Metropolitan! Truly, I was worthy of
receiving him.” “All right then. To whom did he go when he
left Moscow?” “I know, but I won't tell you!” (The Metropolitan
had escaped to Finland via an underground railroad of believers. )
At first the interrogators took turns, and then they went after her
in groups. They shook their fists in the little old woman’s face,
and she replied: “There is nothing you can do with me even if you
cut me into pieces. After all, you are afraid of your bosses, and
you are afraid of each other, and you are even afraid of killing
me.” (They would lose contact with the underground railroad.)
“But I am not afraid of anything. I would be glad to be judged
by God right this minute.”

There were such people in 1937 too, people who did not return
to their cell for their bundles of belongings, who chose death,
who signed nothing denouncing anyone.

One can’t say that the history of the Russian revolutionaries
has given us any better examples of steadfastness. But there is
no comparison anyway, because none of our revolutionaries ever
knew what a really good interrogation could be, with fifty-two
different methods to choose from.

Sheshkovsky did not subject Radishchev to torture. And be-
cause of contemporary custom, Radishchev knew perfectly well
that his sons would serve as officers in the imperial guard no mat-
ter what happened to him, and that their lives wouldn’t be cut
short. Nor would anyone confiscate Radishchev’s family estate.
Nonetheless, in the course of his brief two-week interrogation,
this outstanding man renounced his beliefs and his book and
begged for mercy.

Nicholas I didn’t have enough imagination to arrest the wives
of the Decembrists and compel them to scream in the interroga-
tion room next door, or even to torture the Decembrists them-
selves. But in any case he didn’t need to. Even Ryleyev “answered

132 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

fully, frankly, and hid nothing.” Even Pestel broke down and
named comrades (who were still free) assigned to bury Russkaya
Pravda and the very place where it had been buried.” There were
very few who, like Lunin, expressed disdain and contempt for
the investigating commission. The majority behaved badly and
got one another more deeply involved. Many of them begged
abjectly to be pardoned! Zavalishin put all the blame on Ryleyev.
Y. P. Obolensky and S. P. Trubetskoi couldn’t wait to slander
Griboyedov—which even Nicholas I didn’t believe.

Bakunin in his Confessions abjectly groveled before Nicholas
I—thereby avoiding execution. Was this wretchedness of soul?
Or revolutionary cunning?

One would think that those who decided to assassinate Alex-
ander II must have been people of the highest selflessness and
dedication. After all, they knew what the stakes were! Grinye-
vitsky shared the fate of the Tsar, but Rysakov remained alive and
was held for interrogation. And that very day he blabbed on the
participants in the plot and identified their secret meeting places.
Out of fear for his young life he rushed to give the government
more information than he could ever have been suspected of
having. He nearly choked with repentance; he proposed to “ex-
pose all the secrets of the Anarchists.”

At the end of the last century and the beginning of this one,
the Tsarist interrogator immediately withdrew his question if
the prisoner found it inappropriate or too intimate. But in Kresty
Prison in 1938, when the old political hard-labor prisoner Zelen-
sky was whipped with ramrods with his pants pulled down like
a small boy, he wept in his cell: “My Tsarist interrogator didn’t
even dare address me rudely.”

Or, for example, we learn from recently published research”?
that the Tsarist gendarmes seized the manuscript of Lenin’s es-
say “What Are Our Ministers Thinking Of?” but were unable to
get at its author:

“At the interrogation the gendarmes, just as one might have
expected, learned very little from the student Vaneyev. [The

27. In part, the reason for this was the same as in the case of Bukharin many
years later. They were, after all, being interrogated by their social equals, their

class brothers, and so their desire to explain everything was only natural.
28. R. Peresvetov, Novy Mir, No. 4, 1962.

The Interrogation | 133

italics here and throughout this quotation are my own.] He in-
formed them only that the manuscripts found at his place had
been brought to him in one package for safekeeping several days
before the search by a certain person whom he did not wish to
name. Therefore the interrogator’s sole alternative was to turn
the manuscripts over for expert analysis.” The experts learned
nothing. (What did he mean—his “sole alternative”? What about
icy water up to the ankles? Or a salt-water douche? Or Ryumin’s
truncheon?) It would seem that the author of this article, R.
Peresvetov, himself served time for several years and might easily
have enumerated what “alternatives” the interrogator actually
had when confronting the guardian of Lenin’s “What Are Our
Ministers Thinking Of?”

As S. P. Melgunov recollects: “That was a Tsarist prison, a
prison of blessed memory, which political prisoners nowadays
can only recall with a feeling almost of gladness.”*?

But that is a case of displaced concepts. The yardstick is totally
different. Just as oxcart drivers of Gogol’s time could not have
imagined the speed of a jet plane, those who have never gone
through the receiving-line meat grinder of Gulag cannot grasp
the true possibilities of interrogation.

We read in Izvestiya for May 24, 1959, that Yulipa Rumyan-
tseva was confined in the internal prison of a Nazi camp while
they tried to find out from her the whereabouts of her husband,
who had escaped from that same camp. She knew, but she refused
to tell! For a reader who is not in the know this is a model of
heroism. For a reader with a bitter Gulag past it’s a model of in-
efficient interrogation: Yuliya did not die under torture, and she
was not driven insane. A month later she was simply released—
still very much alive and kicking.

All these thoughts about standing firm as a rock were quite
unknown to me in February, 1945. Not only was I not in the
least prepared to cut my cozy ties with earth, I was even quite

29. S. P. Melgunov, Vospominaniya i Dnevniki, (Memoirs and Diaries),
Vol. 1, Paris, 1964, p. 139.

134 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

angry for a long time because a hundred or so Faber pencils had
been taken away from me when I was arrested. Looking back on
my interrogation from my long subsequent imprisonment, I had
no reason to be proud of it. I might have borne myself more
firmly; and in all probability I could have maneuvered more skill-
fully. But my first weeks were characterized by a mental blackout
and a slump into depression. The only reason these recollections
do not torment me with remorse is that, thanks be to God, I
avoided getting anyone else arrested. But I came close to it.
Although we were front-line officers, Nikolai V. and I, who
were involved in the same case, got ourselves into prison through
a piece of childish stupidity. He and I corresponded during the
war, between two sectors of the front; and though we knew
perfectly well that wartime censorship of correspondence was in
effect, we indulged in fairly outspoken expressions of our political
outrage and in derogatory comments about the Wisest of the
Wise, whom we labeled with the transparently obvious nick-
name of Pakhan or Ringleader of the Thieves. (When, later
on, I reported our case in various prisons, our naiveté aroused
only laughter and astonishment. Other prisoners told me that
two more such stupid jackasses couldn’t exist. And I became
convinced of it myself. Then suddenly, one day, reading some
documents on the case of Aleksandr Ulyanov, Lenin’s elder
brother, I learned that he and his confederates got caught in
exactly the same way—a careless exchange of letters. And that
was the only reason Alexander IIT didn’t die on March 1, 1887.)*°
The office of my interrogator, I. I. Yezepov, was high-ceilinged,
spacious and bright, with an enormous window. (The Rossiya
Insurance Company had not been built with torture in mind.)
And, putting to use its seventeen feet of height, a full-length,
vertical, thirteen-foot portrait of that powerful Sovereign hung

30. A member of the group, Andreyushkin sent a frank letter to his friend
in Kharkov: “I am firmly convinced that we are going to have the most
merciless terror—and in the fairly near future too. . .. Red Terror is my hobby.
... I am worried about my addressee. . . . If he gets it, then I may get it too,
and that will be unfortunate because I will drag in a lot of very effective people.”
It was not the first such letter he had written! And the unhurried search this
letter initiated continued for five weeks, via Kharkov, in order to discover who
in St. Petersburg had written it. Andreyushkin’s identity was not established
until February 28. On March 1, the bomb throwers, bombs in hand, were ar-
rested on Nevsky Prospekt just before the attempted assassination.

The Interrogation | 135

there, toward whom I, grain of sand that I was, had expressed my
hatred. Sometimes the interrogator stood in front of the portrait
and declaimed dramatically: “We are ready to lay down our lives
for him! We are ready to lie down in the path of oncoming tanks
for his sake!” Face to face with the altarlike grandeur of that por-
trait, my mumbling about some kind of purified Leninism seemed
pitiful, and I myself seemed a blasphemous slanderer deserving
only death.

The contents of our letters provided more than enough, in
keeping with the standards of those times, to sentence us both.
Therefore my interrogator did not have to invent anything. He
merely tried to cast his noose around everyone I had ever written
to or received a letter from. I had expressed myself vehemently in
letters to friends my own age and had been almost reckless in
spelling out seditious ideas, but my friends for some reason had
continued to correspond with me! And some suspicious phrases
could be found in their replies to my letters.** And then Yezepov,
like Porfiri Petrovich, demanded that I explain it all in a coherent
way: if we had expressed ourselves in such a fashion in letters
that we knew were subject to censorship, what could we have
said to each other face to face? I could not convince him that all
my fire-eating talk was confined to my letters. And at that point,
with muddled mind, I had to undertake to weave something
credible about my meetings with my friends—meetings referred
to in my letters. What I said had to jibe with the letters, in such
a way as to be on the very edge of political matters and yet not
fall under that Criminal Code. Moreover, these explanations
had to pour forth quickly, all in one breath, so as to convince this
veteran interrogator of my naiveté, my humility, my total honesty.
The main thing was not to provoke my lazy interrogator to any
interest in looking through that accursed load of stuff I had

31. One of our school friends was nearly arrested because of me at this time.
It was an enormous relief to me to learn later that he was still free! But then,
twenty-two years later, he wrote to me: “On the basis of your published works I
conclude that you take a one-sided view of life. . . . Objectively speaking, you
have become the standard-bearer of Fascist reactionaries in the West, in West
Germany and the United States, for example. . . . Lenin, whom, I’m convinced,
you love and honor just as much as you used to, yes, and old Marx and Engels,
too, would have condemned you in the severest fashion. Think about that!”
Indeed, I do think about that: How sorry I am that you didn’t get arrested then!
How. much you lost!

136 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

brought in my accursed suitcase—including many notebooks of
my “War Diary,” written in hard, light pencil in a needle-thin
handwriting, with some of the notes already partially washed out.
These diaries constituted my claim to becoming a writer. I had
not believed in the capacities of our amazing memory, and
throughout the war years I had tried to write down everything I
saw. That would have been only half a catastrophe: I also wrote
down everything I heard from other people. But opinions and
stories which were so natural in front-line areas seemed to be
treasonable here in the rear and reeked of raw imprisonment for
my front-line comrades. So to prevent that interrogator from
going to work on my “War Diary” and mining from it a whole
case against a free front-line tribe, I repented just as much as I
had to and pretended to see the light and reject my political mis-
takes. I became utterly exhausted from this balancing on a razor’s
edge, until I recognized that no one was being hauled in for a
confrontation with me and distinguished the clear signs that the
interrogation was drawing to anend... until, in the fourth month,
all the notebooks of my “War Diary” were cast into the hellish
maw of the Lubyanka furnace, where they burst into flame—the
red pyre of one more novel which had perished in Russia—and
flew out of the highest chimney in black butterflies of soot.

We used to walk in the shadow of that chimney, our exercise
yard a boxlike concrete enclosure on the roof of the Big Lub-
yanka, six floors up. The walls rose around us to approximately
three times a man’s height. With our own ears we could hear
Moscow—automobile horns honking back and forth. But all we
could see was that chimney, the guard posted in a seventh-floor
tower, and that segment of God’s heaven whose unhappy fate it
was to float over the Lubyanka.

Oh, that soot! It kept falling on and on in that first postwar
May. So much of it fell during each of our walks that we decided
the Lubyanka must be burning countless years of files. My
doomed diary was only one momentary plume of that soot. I
recalled a frosty sunny morning in March when I was sitting in
the interrogator’s office. He was asking his customary crude ques-
tions and writing down my answers, distorting my words as he
did so. The sun played in the melting latticework of the frost on
the wide window, through which at times I felt very much like
jumping, so as to flash through Moscow at least in death and

The Interrogation | 137

smash onto the sidewalk five floors below, just as, in my child-
hood, my unknown predecessor had jumped from House 33 in
Rostov-on-the-Don. In the gaps where the frost had melted, the
rooftops of Moscow could be seen, rooftop after rooftop, and
above them merry little puffs of smoke. But I was staring not in
that direction but at a mound of piled-up manuscripts—someone
else’s—covering the entire center of the floor in this half-empty
room, thirty-six square yards in area, manuscripts which had
been dumped there a little while before and had not yet been
examined. In notebooks, in file folders, in homemade binders, in
tied and untied bundles, and simply in loose pages. The manu-
scripts lay there like the burial mound of some interred human
spirit, its conical top rearing higher than the interrogator’s desk, al-
most blocking me from his view. And brotherly pity ached in me
for the labor of that unknown person who had been arrested the
previous night, these spoils from the search of his premises hav-
ing been dumped that very morning on the parquet floor of the
torture chamber, at the feet of that thirteen-foot Stalin. I sat
there and I wondered: Whose extraordinary life had they brought
in for torment, for dismemberment, and then for burning?

Oh, how many ideas and works had perished in that building
—a whole lost culture? Oh, soot, soot, from the Lubyanka
chimneys! And the most hurtful thing of all was that our descend-
ants would consider our generation more stupid, less gifted, less
vocal than in actual fact it was.

One needs to have only two points in order to draw a straight
line between them.

In 1920, as Ehrenburg recalls, the Cheka addressed him as
follows:

“You prove to us that you are not Wrangel’s agent.”

And in 1950, one of the leading colonels of the MGB, Foma
Fomich Zheleznov, said to his prisoners: “We are not going
to sweat to prove the prisoner’s guilt to him. Let him prove to
us that he did not have hostile intent.”

And along this cannibalistically artless straight line lie the
recollections of countless millions.

What a speed-up and simplification of criminal investigation

138 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

previously unknown to mankind! The Organs altogether freed
themselves of the burden of obtaining proof! Trembling and pale,
the rabbit who had been caught, deprived of the right to write
anyone, phone anyone, bring anything with him from freedom,
-deprived too of sleep, food, paper, pencils, and even buttons,
seated on a bare stool in the corner of an office, had to try to find
out for himself and display to that loafer of an interrogator proof
that he did not have hostile intentions. If he could not discover
such proof (and where would he find it?), by that very failure he
provided the interrogation with approximate proof of his guilt!

I knew of a case in which a certain old man who had been a
prisoner in Germany managed nonetheless, sitting there on his
bare stool and gesturing with his cold fingers, to prove to his
monster of an interrogator that he did not betray his Motherland
and even that he did not have any such intention! It was a
scandal! And what happened? Did they free him? Of course not
—after all, he told me about this in Butyrki and not on Tverskoi
Boulevard in the middle of Moscow. At that point a second inter-
rogator joined the first and they spent a quiet evening reminisc-
ing with the old man. Then the two interrogators signed witnesses’
affidavits stating that in the course of the evening the hungry,
sleepy old man had engaged in anti-Soviet propaganda! Things
were said innocently—but they weren’t listened to innocently.
The old man was then turned over to a third interrogator, who
quashed the treason indictment and neatly nailed him with that
very same tenner for Anti-Soviet Agitation during his interroga-
tion.

Given that interrogations had ceased to be an attempt to get at
the truth, for the interrogators in difficult cases they became a
mere exercise of their duties as executioners and in easy cases
simply a pastime and a basis for receiving a salary.

And easy cases always existed, even in the notorious year —
1937. For example, Borodko was accused of having visited his
parents in Poland sixteen years before without having a passport
for foreign travel. (His papa and mama lived all of ten versts—six
miles—away, but the diplomats had signed away that part of
Byelorussia to Poland, and in 1921 people had not yet gotten used
to that fact and went back and forth as they pleased.) The inter-
rogation took just half an hour. Question: Did you go there?

The Interrogation | 139

Answer: I did. Question: How? Answer: Horseback, of course.
Conclusion: Take ten years for KRD.*

But that sort of pace smells of the Stakhanovite movement,
a movement which found no disciples among the bluecaps. Ac-
cording to the Code of Criminal Procedure every interrogation
was supposed to take two months. And if it presented difficulties,
one was allowed to ask the prosecutor for several continuations of
a month apiece (which, of course, the prosecutors never refused).
Thus it would have been stupid to risk one’s health, not to take
advantage of these postponements, and, speaking in factory terms,
to raise one’s work norms. Having worked with voice and fist in
the initial assault week of every interrogation, and thereby ex-
pended one’s will and character (as per Vyshinsky), the inter-
rogators had a vital interest in dragging out the remainder of
every case as long as possible. That way more old, subdued cases
were on hand and fewer new ones. It was considered just indecent
to complete a political interrogation in two months.

The state system itself suffered from its own lack of trust and
from its rigidity. These interrogators were selected personnel, but
they weren’t trusted either. In all probability they, too, were re-
quired to check in on arriving and check out on leaving, and the
prisoners were, of course, checked in and out when called for
questioning. What else could the interrogators do to keep the
bookkeepers’ accounts straight? They would summon one of their
defendants, sit him down in a corner, ask him some terrifying
question—and then forget about him while they themselves sat
for a long time reading the paper, writing an outline for a political
indoctrination course or personal letters, or went off to visit one
another, leaving guards to act as watchdogs in their place. Peace-
fully batting the breeze on the sofa with a colleague who had just
dropped in, the interrogator would come to himself once in a
while, look threateningly at the accused, and say:

“Now there’s a rat! There’s a real rat for you! Well, that’s all
right, we’ll not be stingy about his nine grams!”

My interrogator also made frequent use of the telephone. For
example, he used to phone home and tell his wife—with his
sparkling eyes directed at me—that he was going to be working
all night long so she mustn’t expect him before morning. (My

32. KRD = Counter-Revolutionary Activity.

140 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

heart, of course, fell. That meant he would be working me over all
night long!) But then he would immediately dial the phone num-
ber of his mistress and, in purring tones, make a date with her for
the night. (So: I would be able to get some sleep! I felt relieved.)

Thus it was that the faultless system was moderated only by the
shortcomings of those who carried it out.

Certain of the more curious interrogators used to enjoy using
“empty” interrogations to broaden their knowledge of life. They
might ask the accused prisoner about the front (about those very
German tanks beneath which they never quite managed to find
the time to throw themselves). Or perhaps about the customs of
European countries and lands across the sea which the prisoner
had visited: about the stores and the merchandise sold in them,
and particularly about procedures in foreign whorehouses and
about all kinds of adventures with women.

The Code of Criminal Procedure provided that the prosecutor
was to review continuously the course of every interrogation to
ensure its being conducted correctly. But no one in our time ever
saw him face to face until the so-called “questioning by the
prosecutor,” which meant the interrogation was nearing its end.
I, too, was taken to such a “questioning.” Lieutenant Colonel
Kotov, a calm, well-nourished, impersonal blond man, who was
neither nasty nor nice but essentially a cipher, sat behind his
desk and, yawning, examined for the first time the file on my case.
He spent fifteen minutes acquainting himself with it while I
watched. (Since this. “questioning” was quite unavoidable and
since it was also recorded, there would have been no sense at all
in his studying the file at some earlier, unrecorded time and
then having had to remember details of the case for a certain
number of hours.) Finally, he raised his indifferent eyes to stare
at the wall and asked lazily what I wanted to add to my testimony.

He was required by law to ask what complaints I had about
the conduct of the interrogation and whether coercion had been
used or any violations of my legal rights had occurred. But it
had been a long time since prosecutors asked such questions. And
what if they had? After all, the existence of that entire Ministry
building with its thousands of rooms, and of all five thousand of
the Ministry’s other interrogation buildings, railroad cars, caves,
and dugouts scattered throughout the Soviet Union, was based

The Interrogation | 141

on violations of legal rights. And it certainly wasn’t up to Lieu-
tenant Colonel Kotov and me to reverse that whole process.

Anyway, all the prosecutors of any rank at all held their posi-
tions with the approval of that very same State Security which...
they were supposed to check up on.

His own wilted state, his lack of combativeness, and his fatigue
from all those endless stupid cases were somehow transmitted to
me. So I didn’t raise questions of truth with him. I requested only
that one too obvious stupidity be corrected: two of us had been
indicted in the same case, but our interrogations were conducted
in different places—mine in Moscow and my friend’s at the front.
Therefore I was processed singly, yet charged under Section 11—
in other words, as a group, an organization. As persuasively as
possible, I requested him to cancel this additional charge under
Section 11.

He leafed through the case for another five minutes, sighed,
spread out his hands, and said:

“What’s there to say? One person is a person and two persons
are... people.”

But one person and a half—is that an organization?

And he pushed the button for them to come and take me away.

Soon after that, late one evening in late May, in that same
office with a sculptured bronze clock on the marble mantel, my
interrogator summoned me for a “206” procedure. This was, in
accordance with the provisions of the Code of Criminal Proce-
dure, the defendant’s review of the case before his final signa-
ture. Not doubting for one moment that I would sign, the inter-
rogator was already seated, writing the conclusion of the indict-
ment.

I opened the cover of the thick file, and there, on the inside of
the cover in printed text, I read an astonishing statement. It
turned out that during the interrogation I had had the right to
make written complaints against anything improper in its con-
duct, and that the interrogator was obliged to staple these com-
plaints into my record! During the interrogation! Not at its end.

Alas, not one of the thousands with whom I was later im-
prisoned had been aware of this right.

I turned more pages. I saw photocopies of my own letters and
a totally distorted interpretation of their meaning by unknown

142 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

commentators (like Captain Libin). I saw the hyperbolized lie
in which Captain Yezepov had wrapped up my careful testimony.
And, last but not least, I saw the idiocy whereby I, one individual,
was accused as a “group”!

“I won't sign,” I said, without much firmness. “You conducted
the interrogation improperly.”

“All right then, let’s begin it all over again!” Maliciously he
compressed his lips. “We’ll send you off to the place where we
keep the Polizei.”

He even stretched out his hand as though to take the file away
from me. (At that point I held onto it.)

Somewhere outside the fifth-floor windows of the Lubyanka,
the golden sunset: sun glowed. Somewhere it was May. The office
windows, like all the windows facing outward, were tightly closed
and had not yet been unsealed after the winter—so that fresh
air and the fragrance of things in bloom should not creep into
those hidden rooms. The bronze clock on the mantel, from which
the last rays of the sun had disappeared, quietly chimed.

Begin all over again? It seemed to me it would be easier to
die than to begin all over again. Ahead of me loomed at least
some kind of life. (If I had only known what kind!) And then
what about that place where they kept the Polizei? And, in
general, it was a bad idea to make him angry. It would influence
the tone in which he phrased the conclusion of the indictment.

And so I signed. I signed it complete with Section 11, the
significance of which I did not then know. They told me only
that it would not add to my prison term. But because of that Sec-
tion 11 I was later put into a hard-labor camp. Because of that
Section 11 I was sent, even after “liberation,” and without any
additional sentence, into eternal exile.

Maybe it was all for the best. Without both those experiences,
I would not have written this book.

My interrogator had used no methods on me other than sleep-
lessness, lies, and threats—all completely legal. Therefore, in
the course of the “206” procedure, he didn’t have to shove at me
—as did interrogators who had made a mess of things and wanted
to play safe—a document on nondisclosure for me to sign: that
I, the undersigned, under pain of.criminal penalty; swore never to

The Interrogation | 143

tell anyone about the methods used in conducting my interroga-
tion. (No one knows, incidentally, what article of the Code this
comes under. )

In several of the provincial administrations of the NKVD this
measure was carried out in sequence: the typed statement on
nondisclosure was shoved at a prisoner along with the verdict
of the OSO. And later a similar document was shoved at prison-
ers being released from camp, whereby they guaranteed never
to disclose to anyone the state of affairs in camp.

And so? Our habit of obedience, our bent (or broken) back-
bone, did not suffer us either to reject this gangster method of
burying loose ends or even to be enraged by it.

We have lost the measure of freedom. We have no means of
determining where it begins and where it ends. We are an Asiatic
people. On and on and on they go, taking from us those endless
pledges of nondisclosure—everyone not too lazy to ask for them.

By now we are even unsure whether we have the right to talk
about the events of our own lives.

Chapter 4

The Bluecaps

Throughout the grinding of our souls in the gears of the great
Nighttime Institution, when our souls are pulverized and our
flesh hangs down in tatters like a beggar’s rags, we suffer too
much and are too immersed in our own pain to rivet with pene-
trating and far-seeing gaze those pale night executioners who tor-
ture us. A surfeit of inner grief floods our eyes. Otherwise what
historians of our torturers we would be! For it is certain they will
never describe themselves as they actually are. But alas! Every
former prisoner remembers his own interrogation in detail, how
they squeezed him, and what foulness they squeezed out of him
—but often he does not even remember their names, let alone
think about them as human beings. So it is with me. I can recall
much more—and much more that’s interesting—about any one
of my cellmates than I can about Captain of State Security
Yezepov, with whom I spent no little time face to face, the two of
us alone in his office.

There is one thing, however, which remains with us all as an
accurate, generalized recollection: foul rot—a space totally in-
fected with putrefaction. And even when, decades later, we are
long past fits of anger or outrage, in our own quieted hearts we
retain this firm impression of low, malicious, impious, and, pos-
sibly, muddled people.

There is an interesting story about Alexander II, the Tsar sur-
rounded by revolutionaries, who were to make seven attempts on
his life. He once visited the House of Preliminary Detention on
Shpalernaya—the uncle of the Big House—where he ordered
them to lock him up in solitary-confinement cell No. 227. He

144

The Bluecaps | 145

stayed in it for more than an hour, attempting thereby to sense the
state of mind of those he had imprisoned there.

One cannot but admit that for a monarch this was evidence of
moral aspiration, to feel the need and make the effort to take a
spiritual view of the matter.

But it is impossible to picture any of our interrogators, right
up to Abakumov and Beria, wanting to slip into a prisoner’s skin
even for one hour, or feeling compelled to sit and meditate in soli-
tary confinement.

Their branch of service does not require them to be educated
people of broad culture and broad views—and they are not. Their
branch of service does not require them to think logically—and
they do not. Their branch of service requires only that they carry
out orders exactly and be impervious to suffering—and that is
what they do and what they are. We who have passed through
their hands feel suffocated when we think of that legion, which is
stripped bare of universal human ideals.

Although others might not be aware of it, it was clear to the
interrogators at least that the cases were fabricated. Except at
staff conferences, they could not seriously say to one another or to
themselves that they were exposing criminals. Nonetheless they
kept right on producing depositions page after page to make sure
that we rotted. So the essence of it all turns out to be the credo of
the blatnye—the underworld of Russian thieves: “You today; me
tomorrow.”

They understood that the cases were fabricated, yet they kept
on working year after year. How could they? Either they forced
themselves not to think (and this in itself means the ruin of a
human being), and simply accepted that this was the way it had
to be and that the person who gave them their orders was always
right...

But didn’t the Nazis, too, it comes to mind, argue that same way?!

1. There is no way of sidestepping this comparison: both the years and the
methods coincide too closely. And the comparison occurred even more naturally
to those who had passed through the hands of both the Gestapo and the MGB.
One of these was Yevgeny Ivanovich Divnich, an émigré and preacher of Ortho-
dox Christianity. The Gestapo accused him of Communist activities among
Russian workers in Germany, and the MGB charged him with having ties to
the international bourgeoisie. Divnich’s verdict was unfavorable to the MGB.
He was tortured by both, but the Gestapo was nonetheless trying to get at the
truth, and when the accusation did not hold up, Divnich was released. The MGB

wasn’t interested in the truth and had no intention of letting anyone out of
its grip once he was arrested.

146 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

Or else it was a matter of the Progressive Doctrine, the granite
ideology. An interrogator in awful Orotukan—-sent there to the
Kolyma in 1938 as a penalty assignment—was so touched when
M. Lurye, former director of the Krivoi Rog Industrial Complex,
readily agreed to sign an indictment which meant a second camp
term that he used the time they had thus saved to say: “You think
we get any satisfaction from using persuasion?? We have to do
what the Party demands of us. You are an old Party member. Tell
me what would you do in my place?” Apparently Lurye nearly
agreed with him, and it may have been the fact that he had al-
ready been thinking in some such terms that led him to sign so
readily. It is after all a convincing argument.

But most often it was merely a matter of cynicism. The blue-
caps understood the workings of the meat grinder and loved it.
In the Dzhida camps in 1944, interrogator Mironenko said to the
condemned Babich with pride in his faultless logic: “Interrogation
and trial are merely judicial corroboration. They cannot alter your
fate, which was previously decided. If it is necessary to shoot you,
then you will be shot even if you are altogether innocent. If it is
necessary to acquit you,® then no. matter how guilty you are you
will be cleared and acquitted.” Kushnaryev, Chief of the First
Investigation Department of the West Kazakhstan Provincial
State Security Administration, laid it on the line in just that way to
Adolf Tsivilko. “After all, we’re not going to let you out if you’re
a Leningrader!” (In other words, a Communist Party member
with seniority. )

“Just give us a person—and we'll create the case!” That was
what many of them said jokingly, and it was their slogan. What
we think of as torture they think of as good work. The wife of
the interrogator Nikolai Grabishchenko (the Volga Canal Proj-
ect) said touchingly to her neighbors: “Kolya is a very good
worker. One of them didn’t confess for a long time—and they
gave him to Kolya. Kolya talked with him for one night and he
confessed.”

What prompted them all to slip into harness and pursue so
zealously not truth but totals of the processed. and condemned?
Because it was most comfortable for them not to be different from
the others. And because these totals meant an easy life, supple-

2. An affectionate term for torture.
3. This evidently refers to their own people.

The Bluecaps | 147

mentary pay, awards and decorations, promotions in rank, and
the expansion and prosperity of the Organs themselves. If they ran
up high totals, they could loaf when they felt like it, or do poor
work or go out and enjoy themselves at night. And that is just
what they did. Low totals led to their being kicked out, to the
loss of their feedbag. For Stalin could never be convinced that in
any district, or city, or military unit, he might suddenly cease to
have enemies.

That was why they felt no mercy, but, instead, an explosion of
resentment and rage toward those maliciously stubborn: prisoners.
who opposed being fitted into the totals, who would not capitulate
to sleeplessness or the punishment cell or hunger. By refusing to
confess they menaced the interrogator’s personal standing. It was
as though they wanted to bring him down. In such circumstances
all measures were justified! If it’s to be war, then war it will be!
We'll ram the tube down your throat—swallow that salt water!

Excluded by the nature of their work and by deliberate choice
from the higher sphere of human existence, the servitors of the
Blue Institution lived in their lower sphere with all the greater
intensity and avidity. And there they were possessed and directed
by the two strongest instincts of the lower sphere, other than
hunger and sex: greed for power and greed for gain. (Particularly
for power. In recent decades it has turned out to be more im-
portant than money. )

Power is a poison well known for thousands of years. If only
no one were ever to acquire material power over others! But to
the human being who has faith in some force that holds dominion
over all of us, and who is therefore conscious of his own limita-
tions, power is not necessarily fatal. For those, however, who are
unaware of any higher sphere, it is a deadly poison. For them
there is no antidote.

Remember what Tolstoi said about power? Ivan Ilyich had
accepted an official position which gave him authority to destroy
any person he wanted to! All without exception were in his hands,
and anyone, even the most important, could be brought before
him as an accused. (And that is just where our blueboys are!
There is nothing to add to the description.) The consciousness of
this power (and “the possibilities of using it mercifully”—so
Tolstoi qualifies the situation, but this does not in any way apply

148 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

to our boys) constituted for Ivan Ilyich the chief interest and at-
traction of the service.

But attraction is not the right word—it is intoxication! After
all, it is intoxicating. You are still young—still, shall we say paren-
thetically, a sniveling youth. Only a little while ago your parents
were deeply concerned about you and didn’t know where to turn
to launch you in life. You were such a fool you didn’t even want
to study, but you got through three years of that school—and then
how you took off and flew! How your situation changed! How your
gestures changed, your glance, the turn of your head! The learned
council of the scientific institute is in session. You enter and every-
one notices you and trembles. You don’t take the chairman’s chair.
Those headaches are for the rector to take on. You sit off to one
side, but everyone understands that you are head man there. You
are the Special Department. And you can sit there for just five
minutes and then leave. You have that advantage over the pro-
fessors. You can be called away by more important business—but
later on, when you're considering their decision, you will raise
your eyebrows or, better still, purse your lips and say to the rector:
“You can’t do that. There are special considerations involved.”
That’s all! And it won’t be done. Or else you are an osobist—a
State Security representative in the army—-a SMERSH man, and
a mere lieutenant; but the portly old colonel, the commander of
the unit, stands up when you enter the room and tries to flatter you,
to play up to you. He doesn’t even have a drink with his chief
of staff without inviting you to join them. The fact that you have
only two tiny stars on your shoulder boards doesn’t mean a thing;
it is even amusing. After all, your stars have a very different weight
and are measured on a totally different scale from those of ordi-
nary Officers. (On special assignments you are sometimes even
authorized to wear major’s insignia, for example, which is a sort
of incognito, a convention.) You have a power over all the people
in that military unit, or factory, or district, incomparably greater
than that of the military commander, or factory director, or
secretary of the district Communist Party. These men control
people’s military or official duties, wages, reputations, but you
control people’s freedom. And no one dares speak about you at
meetings, and no one will ever dare write about you in the news-
paper—not only something bad but anything good! They don’t
dare. Your name, like that of a jealously guarded deity, cannot

The Bluecaps | 149

even be mentioned. You are there; everyone feels your presence;
but it’s as though you didn’t exist. From the moment you don that
heavenly blue service cap, you stand higher than the publicly
acknowledged power. No one dares check up on what you do. But
no one is exempt from your checking up on him. And therefore,
in dealing with ordinary so-called citizens, who for you are mere
blocks of wood, it is altogether appropriate for you to wear an
ambiguous and deeply thoughtful expression. For, of course, you
are the one—and no one else—who knows about the special
considerations. And therefore you are always right.

There is just one thing you must never forget. You, too, would
have been just such a poor block of wood if you had not had the
luck to become one of the little links in the Organs—that flexible,
unitary organism inhabiting a nation as a tapeworm inhabits a
human body. Everything is yours now! Everything is for you!
Just be true to the Organs! They will always stand up for you!
They will help you swallow up anyone who bothers you! They
will help move every obstacle from your path! But—be true to the
Organs! Do everything they order you to! They will do the think-
ing for you in respect to your functions too: today you serve in
a special unit; tomorrow you will sit in an interrogator’s armchair;
and then perhaps you will travel to Lake Seliger as a folklorist,*
partly, it may be, to get your nerves straightened out. And next
you may be sent from a city where you are too well known to the
opposite end of the country as a Plenipotentiary in Charge of
Church Affairs.° Or perhaps you will become Executive Secretary
of the Union of Soviet Writers. Be surprised at nothing. People’s
true appointments and true ranks are known only to the Organs.
The rest is merely play-acting. Some Honored Artist or other, or
Hero of Socialist Agriculture, is here today, and tomorrow, puff!
he’s gone.”

The duties of an interrogator require work, of course: you have

4. Ilin in 1931.

5. The violent Yaroslavl interrogator Volkopyalov, appointed Plenipotentiary
in Charge of Church Affairs in Moldavia.

6. Another Ilin—this one Viktor Nikolayevich, a former lieutenant general
of State Security.

7. “Who are you?” asked General Serov in Berlin of the world-renowned
biologist Timofeyev-Ressovsky, offensively using the familiar form of address.
And the scientist, who was undismayed and who possessed a Cossack’s heredi-
tary daring, replied, using the same familiar form: “And who are you?” Serov
corrected himself and, this time using the formal and correct form, asked: “Are
you a scientist?”

150 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

to come in during the day, at night, sit for hours and hours—but
not split your skull over “proof.” (Let the prisoner’s head ache
over that.) And you don’t have to worry whether the prisoner is
guilty or not but simply do what the Organs require. And every-
thing will be all right. It will be up to you to make the interroga-
tion periods pass as pleasurably as possible and not to get overly
fatigued. And it would be nice to get some good out of it—at least
to amuse yourself. You have been sitting a long time, and all of
a sudden a new method of persuasion occurs to you! Eureka! So
you call up your friends on the phone, and you go around to other
offices and tell them about it—what a laugh! Who shall we try it
on, boys? It’s really pretty monotonous to keep doing the same
thing all the time. Those trembling hands, those imploring eyes,
that cowardly submissiveness—they are really a bore. If you
could just get one of them to resist! “I love strong opponents!
It’s such fun to break their backs!” said the Leningrad interrogator
Shitov to G. G V.

And if your opponent is so strong that he refuses to give in,
all your methods have failed, and you are in a rage? Then don’t
control your fury! It’s tremendously satisfying, that outburst! Let
your anger have its way; don’t set any bounds to it! Don’t hold
yourself back! That’s when interrogators spit in the open mouth
of the accused! And shove his face into a full cuspidor!® That’s
the state of mind in which they drag priests around by their long
hair! Or urinate in a kneeling prisoner’s face! After such a storm
of fury you feel yourself a real honest-to-God man!

Or else you are interrogating a “foreigner’s girl friend.”® So you
curse her out and then you say: “Come on now, does an American
have a special kind of ? Is that it? Weren’t there enough
Russian ones for you?” And all of a sudden you get an idea:
maybe she learned something from those foreigners. Here’s a
chance not to be missed, like an assignment abroad! And so you
begin to interrogate her energetically: How? What positions?
More! In detail! Every scrap of information! (You can use the
information yourself, and you can tell the other boys too!) The
girl is blushing all over and in tears. “It doesn’t have anything to
do with the case,” she protests. “Yes, it does, speak up!” That’s

8. As happened with Vasilyev, according to Ivanov-Razumnik.
9. Esfir R., 1947.

The Bluecaps | 151

power for you! She gives you the full details. If you want, she’ll
draw a picture for you. If you want, she’ll demonstrate with her
body. She has no way out. In your hands you hold the punish-
ment cell and her prison term.

And if you have asked for a stenographer’ to take down the
questions and answers, and they send in a pretty one, you can
shove your paw down into her bosom right in front of the boy
being interrogated. He’s not a human being after all, and there
is no reason to feel shy in his presence.

In fact, there’s no reason for you to feel shy with anyone. And
if you like the broads—and who doesn’t?—-you’d be a fool not
to make use of your position. Some will be drawn to you because
of your power, and others will give in out of fear. So you’ve met
a girl somewhere and she’s caught your eye? She'll belong to you,
never fear; she can’t get away! Someone else’s wife has caught
your eye? She’ll be yours too! Because, after all, there’s no prob-
lem about removing the husband.” No, indeed! To know what it
meant to be a bluecap one had to experience it! Anything you
saw was yours! Any apartment you looked at was yours! Any
woman was yours! Any enemy was struck from your path! The

10. Interrogator Pokhilko, Kemerovo State Security Administration.

11. The schoolboy Misha B.

12. For a long time I’ve been hanging on to a theme for a story to be called
“The Spoiled Wife.” But it looks as though I will never get the chance to write it,
so here it is. In a certain Far Eastern aviation unit before the Korean War, a
certain lieutenant colonel returned from an assignment to find his wife in a
hospital. The doctors did not hide the truth from him: her sexual organs had
been injured by perverted sexual practices. The lieutenant colonel got in to see
his wife and wrung from her the admission that the man responsible was the
osobist in their unit, a senior lieutenant. (It would seem, by the way, that this
incident had not occurred without some cooperation on her part.) In a rage
the lieutenant colonel ran to the osobist’s office, took out his pistol, and
threatened to kill him. But the senior lieutenant very quickly forced him to
back down and leave the office defeated and pitiful. He threatened to send the
lieutenant colonel to rot in the most horrible of camps, where he’d pray to be
released from life without further torment, and he ordered him to take his wife
back just as he found her—with an injury that was to some extent incurable—
and to live with her, not to dare get a divorce, and not to dare complain. And
all this was the price for not being arrested! The lieutenant colonel did just as
he was ordered. (I was told the story by the osobist’s chauffeur.)

There must have been many such cases, because the abuse of power was par-
ticularly attractive in this area. In 1944, another gaybist—State Security officer
—forced the daughter of an army general to marry him by threatening to arrest
her father. The girl had a fiancé, but to save her father she married the gaybist.
She kept a diary during her brief marriage, gave it to her true love, and then
committed suicide.

152 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

earth beneath your feet was yours! The heaven above you was
yours—it was, after all, like your cap, sky blue!

The passion for gain was their universal passion. After all,
in the absence of any checking up, such power was inevitably used
for personal enrichment. One would have had to be holy to
refrain!

If we were able to discover the hidden motivation behind in-
dividual arrests, we would be astounded to find that, granted the
rules governing arrests in general, 75 percent of the time the
particular choice of whom to arrest, the personal cast of the die,
was determined by human greed and vengefulness; and of that 75
percent, half were the result of material self-interest on the part
of the local NK VD (and, of course, the prosecutor too, for on
this point I do not distinguish between them).

How, for example, did V. G. Vlasov’s nineteen-year-long
journey through the Archipelago begin? As head of the District
Consumer Cooperatives he arranged a sale of textiles for the
activists of the local Party organization. (These materials were
of a sort and quality which no one nowadays would even touch. )
No one was bothered, of course, by the fact that this sale was not
open to the general public. But the prosecutor’s wife was unable
to buy any: She wasn’t there at the time; Prosecutor Rusov him-
self had been shy about approaching the counter; and Vlasov
hadn’t thought to say: “TIl set some aside for you.” (In fact, given
his character, he would never have said this anyway.) Further-
more, Prosecutor Rusov had invited a friend to dine in the re-
stricted Party dining room—such restricted dining rooms used to
exist in the thirties. This friend of his was not high enough in rank
to be admitted there, and the dining room manager refused to
serve him. The prosecutor demanded that Vlasov punish the man-
ager, and Vlasov refused. Vlasov also managed to insult the dis-
trict NK VD, and just as painfully. And he was therefore added
to the rightist opposition.

The motivations and actions of the bluecaps are sometimes so
petty that one can only be astounded. Security officer Senchenko
took a map case and dispatch case from an officer he’d arrested
and started to use them right in his presence, and, by manipu-
lating the documentation, he took a pair of foreign gloves from

The Bluecaps | 153

another prisoner. (When the armies were advancing, the bluecaps
were especially irritated because they got only second pick of the
booty.) The counterintelligence officer of the Forty-ninth Army
who arrested me had a yen for my cigarette case—and it wasn’t
even a cigarette case but a small German Army box, of a tempting
scarlet, however. And because of that piece of shit he carried out
a whole maneuver: As his first step, he omitted it from the list of
belongings that were confiscated from me. (“You can keep it.”)
He thereupon ordered me to be searched again, knowing all the
time that it was all I had in my pockets. “Aha! what’s that? Take
it away!” And to prevent my protests: “Put him in the punish-
ment cell!” (What Tsarist gendarme would have dared behave
that way toward a defender of the Fatherland?)

Every interrogator was given an allowance of a certain number
of cigarettes to encourage those willing to confess and to reward
stool pigeons. Some of them kept all the cigarettes for themselves.

Even in accounting for hours spent in interrogating, they used
to cheat. They got higher pay for night work. And we used to
note the way they wrote down more hours on the night interroga-
tions than they really spent.

Interrogator Fyodorov (Reshety Station, P. O. Box No. 235)
stole a wristwatch while searching the apartment of the free person
Korzukhin. During the Leningrad blockade Interrogator Nikolai
Fyodorovich Kruzhkov told Yelizaveta Viktorovna Strakhovich,
wife of the prisoner he was interrogating, K. I. Strakhovich: “I
want a quilt. Bring it to me!” When she replied: “All our warm
things are in the room they’ve sealed,” he went to her apart-
ment and, without breaking the State Security seal on the lock,
unscrewed the entire doorknob. “That’s how the MGB works,”
he explained gaily. And he went in and began to collect the warm
things, shoving some crystal in his pocket at the same time. She
herself tried to get whatever she could out of the room, but he
stopped her.** “That’s enough for you!”—and he kept on raking
in the booty.

13. In 1954, although her husband, who had forgiven them everything, in-
cluding a death sentence that had been commuted, kept trying to persuade her
not to pursue the matter, this energetic and implacable woman testified against
Kruzhkov at a trial. Because this was not Kruzhkov’s first offense, and because
the interests of the Organs had been violated, he was given a twenty-five-year
sentence. Has he really been in the jug that long?

154 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

There’s no end to such cases. One could issue a thousand
“White Papers” (and beginning in 1918 too). One would need
only to question systematically former prisoners and their wives.
Maybe there are and were bluecaps who never stole anything or
appropriated anything for themselves—but I find it impossible
to imagine one. I simply do not understand: given the bluecaps’
philosophy of life, what was there to restrain them if they liked
some particular thing? Way back at the beginning of the thirties,
when all of us were marching around in the German uniforms of
the Red Youth Front and were building the First Five-Year Plan,
they were spending their evenings in salons like the one in the
apartment of Konkordiya Iosse, behaving like members of the
nobility or Westerners, and their lady friends were showing off
their foreign clothes. Where were they getting those clothes?

Here are their family names—and one might almost think
they were hired because of those names. For example, in the
Kemerovo Provincial State Security Administration, there were:
a prosecutor named Trutnev, “drone”; a chief of the interroga-
tion section Major Shkurkin, “self-server”; his deputy, Lieutenant
Colonel Balandin, “soupy”; and an interrogator Skorokhvatov,
“quick-grabber.” When all is said and done, one could not invent
names more appropriate. And they were all right there together!
(I need hardly bother to mention again Volkopyalov—“wolf-
skin-stretcher’—or Grabishchenko—“plunderer.”) Are’ we to
assume that nothing at all is expressed in people’s family names
and such a concentration of them?

Again the prisoner’s faulty memory. I. Korneyev has forgotten
the name of the colonel of State Security who was also Kon-
kordiya Josse’s friend (they both knew her, it turned out), who
was in the Vladimir Detention Prison at the same time as
Korneyev. This colonel was a living embodiment of the instincts
for power and personal gain. At the beginning of 1945, during
the height of the “war booty” period, he got himself assigned
to that section of the Organs, headed by Abakumov himself,
which was supposed to keep watch over the plundering—in other
words, they tried to grab off as much as possible for themselves,
not for the state. (And succeeded brilliantly.) Our hero pulled
in whole freight car loads and built several dachas, one of them
in Klin. After the war he operated on such a scale that when he
arrived at the Novosibirsk Station he ordered all the customers

The Bluecaps | 155

chased out of the station restaurant and had girls and women
rounded up and forced to dance naked on the tables to entertain
him and his drinking companions. He would have gotten away
with this too, but he violated another important rule. Like Kruzh-
kov, he went against his own kind. Kruzhkov deceived the Organs.
And this colonel did perhaps even worse. He laid bets on which
wives he could seduce, and not just ordinary wives, but the
wives of his colleagues in the Security police. And he was not
forgiven! He was sentenced to a political prison under Article
58, and was serving out his time fuming at their having dared to
arrest him. He had no doubt they would change their minds. (And
perhaps they did.)

That dread fate—to be thrown into prison themselves—was
not such a rarity for the bluecaps. There was no genuine insur-
ance against it. But somehow these men were slow to sense the les-
sons of the past. Once again this was probably due to their hav-
ing no higher powers of reason; their low-grade intellect would
tell them: It happens only rarely; very few get caught; it may
pass me by; my friends won’t let me down.

Friends, as a matter of fact, did try not to leave their friends
in a bad spot. They had their own unspoken understanding: at
least to arrange favorable conditions for friends. (This was the
case, for example, with Colonel I. Y. Vorobyev in the Marfino
Special Prison, and with the same V. N. Ilin who was in the
Lubyanka for more than eight years.) Thanks to this caste spirit,
those arrested singly, as a result of only personal shortcomings,
usually did not do too badly. And that was how they were able
to justify their sense of immunity from punishment in their day-
to-day work in the service. But there were several known cases
when camp Security officers were tossed into ordinary camps to
serve out their sentences. There were even instances when as
prisoners they ran into zeks who had once been under their thumb
and came off badly in the encounter. For example, Security of-
ficer Munshin, who cherished a particularly violent hatred toward
the 58’s in camp and had relied heavily on the support of the
blatnye, the habitual thieves, was driven right under the board
bunks by those very same thieves. However, we have no way to
learn more details about these cases in order to be able to explain
them.

But those gaybisty—the State Security officers—who got

156 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

caught in a wave were in very serious danger. (They had their own
waves!) A wave is a natural catastrophe and is even more power-
ful than the Organs themselves. In this situation, no one was going
to help anyone else lest he be drawn into the same abyss him-
self.

The possibility did exist, however, if you were well informed
and had a sharp Chekist sensitivity, of getting yourself out from
under the avalanche, even at the last minute, by proving that you
had no connection with it. Thus it was that Captain Sayenko (not
the Kharkov Chekist carpenter of 1918-1919, who was famous
for executing prisoners with his pistol, punching holes in bodies
with his saber, breaking shinbones in two, flattening heads with
weights, and branding people with hot irons,** but, perhaps, a rel-
ative) was weak enough to marry for love an ex-employee of the
Chinese Eastern Railroad named Kokhanskaya. And suddenly he
found out, right at the beginning of the wave, that all the Chinese
Eastern Railroad people were going to be arrested. At this time
he was head of the Security Operations Department of the Arch-
angel GPU. He acted without losing a moment. How? He arrested
his own beloved wife! And not on the basis of her being one of
the Chinese Eastern Railroad people—but on the basis of a case
he himself cooked up. Not only did he save himself, but he moved
up and became the Chief of the Tomsk Province NKVD."

The waves were generated by the Organs’ hidden law of self-
renewal—a small periodic ritual sacrifice so that the rest could
take on the appearance of being purified. The Organs had to
change personnel faster than the normal rate of human growth
and aging would ensure. Driven by that same implacable urgency
that forces the sturgeon to swim upriver and perish in the shallows,
to be replaced by schools of small fry, a certain number of
“schools” of gaybisty had to sacrifice themselves. This law was
easily apparent to a higher intelligence, but the bluecaps them-
selves did not want to accept the fact of its existence and make
provision for it. Yet, at the hour appointed in their stars, the
kings of the Organs, the aces of the Organs, and even the minis-
ters themselves laid their heads down beneath their own guil-
lotine.

14. Roman Gul, Dzerzhinsky. Menzhinsky—Peters—Latsis—Yagoda, Paris,
1936.

15. This, too, is a theme for a story—and how many more there are in this
field! Maybe someone will make use of them someday.

The Bluecaps | 157

Yagoda took one such school of fish along with him. No doubt
many of those“whose glorious names we shall come to admire
when we come to the White Sea Canal were taken in this school
and their names thenceforward expunged from the poetic eulogies.

Very shortly, a second school accompanied the short-lived
Yezhov. Some of the finest cavaliers of 1937 vanished in this one.
(Yet one ought not to exaggerate their number. It did not by any
means include all the best.) Yezhov himself was beaten during
his interrogation. He was pitiful. And Gulag was orphaned dur-
ing this wave of arrests. For example, arrested with Yezhov were
the Chief of the Financial Administration of Gulag, the Chief of
the Medical Administration of Gulag, the Chief of the Guard
Service of Gulag (VOKhR),’® and even the Chief of the Security
Operations Department of Gulag, who oversaw the work of the
camp “godfathers.”

And later there was the school of Beria.

The corpulent, conceited Abakumov had fallen earlier, sepa-
rately.

Someday—if the archives are not destroyed—the historians
of the Organs will recount all this step by step, with all the figures
and all the glittering names.

Therefore, I am going to write only briefly about Ryumin and
Abakumov, a story I learned only by chance. I will not repeat
what I have already written about them in The First Circle.

Ryumin had been raised to the heights by Abakumov and was
very close to him. At the end of 1952, he came to Abakumov with
the sensational report that Professor Etinger, a physician, had
confessed to intentional malpractice when treating Zhdanov and
Shcherbakov, with the purpose of killing them. Abakumov re-
fused to believe him. He knew the whole cookery and decided
Ryumin was getting too big for his britches. (But Ryumin had a
better idea of what Stalin wanted!) To verify the story, they
arranged to cross-question Etinger that very evening. But each
of them drew different conclusions from his testimony. Abakumov
concluded that there was no such thing as a “doctors’ case.” And
Ryumin concluded that there was. A second attempt at verifica-
tion was to take place the following morning, but, thanks to the
miraculous attributes of the Nighttime Institution, Etinger died

16. VOKhR: Militarized Guard Service, formerly the Internal Guard Service
of the Republic.

158 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

that very night! In the morning, Ryumin, bypassing Abakumov
and without his knowledge, telephoned the Central Committee
and asked for an appointment with Stalin! (My own opinion,
however, is that this was not his most decisive step. Ryumin’s
decisive action, following which his life hung in the balance, was
in not going along with Abakumov earlier. And perhaps in hav-
ing Etinger killed that same night. Who knows the secrets of those
courtyards! Had Ryumin’s contact with Stalin begun earlier
perhaps?) Stalin received Ryumin, set in motion the “doctors’
case” and arrested Abakumov. From that point on it would seem
that Ryumin conducted the “doctors’ case” independently of
and even despite Beria! There were signs before Stalin’s death
that Beria was in danger—and perhaps it was he who arranged
to have Stalin done away with. One of the first acts of the new
government was to dismiss the “doctors’ case.” At that time
Ryumin was arrested (while Beria was still in power), but
Abakumov was not released! At the Lubyanka a new order of
things was introduced. And for the first time in its entire existence
a prosecutor crossed its threshold—D. Terekhov. Imprisoned,
Ryumin was fidgety and subservient: “I am not guilty. I am here
for no reason.” He asked to be interrogated. As was his custom,
he was sucking a hard candy at the time, and when Terekhov
rebuked him for it, he spat it out on the palm of his hand. “Pardon
me.” As we have already reported, Abakumov roared with laugh-
ter: “Hocus-pocus!” Terekhov showed him the document author-
izing him to inspect the Internal Prison of the Ministry of State
Security. Abakumov brushed it away: “You can forge five hun-
dred of those!” As an organizational “patriot,” he was principally
offended not by being in prison but by this encroachment on the
power of the Organs, which could not be subordinate to anything
in the world! In July, 1953, Ryumin was tried in Moscow and
shot. And Abakumov remained in prison! During one interroga-
tion he said to Terekhov: “Your eyes are too beautiful. Z am
going to be sorry to have to shoot you!™ Leave my case alone.
Leave it while you still have time.” On another occasion Terekhov

17. This is true. On the whole, D. Terekhov is a man of uncommon strength
of will and courage (which were what was required in bringing the big Stalinists
to justice in an uneasy situation). And he evidently has a lively mind as well.
If Khrushchev’s reforms had been more thoroughgoing and consistent, Tere-
khov might have excelled in carrying them out. That is how historic leaders fail
to materialize in our country.

The Bluecaps | 159

called him in and handed him the newspaper which carried the
announcement of Beria’s exposure. At the time this was virtually
a cosmic upheaval. Abakumov read it and, with not so much as
the twitch of an eyebrow, he turned the page and started to read
the sports news! On another occasion, during an interrogation in
the presence of a high-ranking gaybist who had, in the recent past,
been his subordinate, Abakumov asked him: “How could you
have permitted the investigation of the Beria case to be con-
ducted by the prosecutor’s office instead of by the MGB?” (Every-
thing in his own domain kept nagging him.) He went on: “Do
you really believe they are going to put me, the Minister of State
Security, on trial?” The answer was “Yes.” And he replied: “Then
put on your top hat! The Organs are finished!” (He was, of course,
too pessimistic, uneducated courier that he was.) But when he
was in the Lubyanka, Abakumov was not afraid of being tried;
he was afraid of being poisoned. (This, too, showed what a worthy
son of the Organs he was!) He started to reject the prison food
altogether and would eat only eggs that he bought from the prison
store. (In this case, he simply lacked technical imagination. He
thought one couldn’t poison eggs.) The only books he borrowed
from the well-stocked Lubyanka library were the works of, believe
it or not, Stalin! (Who had imprisoned him.) But in all likelihood
this was for show rather than the result of any calculation that
Stalin’s adherents would gain power. He spent two years in prison.
Why didn’t they release him? The question is not a naive one. In
terms of his crimes against humanity, he was over his head in
blood. But he was not the only one! And all the others came out
of it safe and sound. There is some hidden secret here too: there
is a vague rumor that in his time he had personally beaten
Khrushchev’s daughter-in-law Lyuba Sedykh, the wife of Khru-
shchev’s older son, who had been condemned to a punishment bat-
talion in Stalin’s time and who died as a result. And, so goes the
rumor, this was why, having been imprisoned by Stalin, he was
tried—in Leningrad—under Khrushchev and shot on December
18, 1954.18 But Abakumov had no real reason to be depressed:
the Organs still didn’t perish because of that.

18. Here is one more of his eccentricities as a VIP: he used to change into
civilian clothes and walk around Moscow with Kuznetsov, the head of his
bodyguard, and whenever he felt like it, he would hand out money from the

Cheka operations funds. Does not this smell of Old Russia—charity for the sake
of one’s soul?

160 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

As the folk saying goes: If you speak for the wolf, speak against
him as well.

Where did this wolf-tribe appear from among our people?
Does it really stem from our own roots? Our own blood?

It is our own.

And just so we don’t go around flaunting too proudly the white
mantle of the just, let everyone ask himself: “If my life had turned
out differently, might I myself not have become just such an ex-
ecutioner?”

It is a dreadful question if one really answers it honestly.

I remember my third year at the university, in the fall of 1938.
We young men of the Komsomol were summoned before the Dis-
trict Komsomol Committee not once but twice. Scarcely bothering
to ask our consent, they shoved an application form at us: You've
had enough physics, mathematics, and chemistry; it’s more im-
portant to your country for you to enter the NKVD school.
(That’s the way it always is. It isn’t just some person who needs
you; it is always your Motherland. And it is always some official
or other who speaks on behalf of your Motherland and who
knows what she needs. )

One year before, the District Committee had conducted a drive
among us to recruit candidates for the air force schools. We
avoided getting involved that time too, because we didn’t want
to leave the university—but we didn’t sidestep recruitment then
as stubbornly as we did this time.

Twenty-five years later we could think: Well, yes, we under-
stood the sort of arrests that were being made at the time, and
the fact that they were torturing people in prisons, and the slime
they were trying to drag us into. But it isn’t true! After all, the
Black Marias were going through the streets at night, and we
were the same young people who were parading with banners
during the day. How could we know anything about those arrests
and why should we think about them? All the provincial leaders
had been removed, but as far as we were concerned it didn’t mat-
ter. Two or three professors had been arrested, but after all they
hadn’t been our dancing partners, and it might even be easier

The Bluecaps | 161

to pass our exams as a result. Twenty-year-olds, we marched in
the ranks of those born the year the Revolution took place, and
because we were the same age as the Revolution, the brightest of
futures lay ahead.

It would be hard to identify the exact source of that inner
intuition, not founded on rational argument, which prompted our
refusal to enter the NKVD schools. It certainly didn’t derive from
the lectures on historical materialism we listened to: it was clear
from them that the struggle against the internal enemy was a
crucial battlefront, and to share in it was an honorable task. Our
decision even ran counter to our material interests: at that time
the provincial university we attended could not promise us any-
thing more than the chance to teach in a rural school in a remote
area for miserly wages. The NKVD school dangled before us
special rations and double or triple pay. Our feelings could not be
put into words—and even if we had found the words, fear would
have prevented our speaking them aloud to one another. It was
not our minds that resisted but something inside our breasts. Peo-
ple can shout at you from all sides: “You must!” And your own
head can be saying also: “You must!” But inside your breast there
is a sense of revulsion, repudiation. I don’t want to. It makes me
feel sick. Do what you want without me; I want no part of it.

This came from very far back, quite likely as far back as
Lermontov, from those decades of Russian life when frankly and
openly there was no worse and no more vile branch of the service
for a decent person than that of the gendarmerie. No, it went back
even further. Without even knowing it ourselves, we were ran-
somed by the small change in copper that was left from the golden
coins our great-grandfathers had expended, at a time when moral-
ity was not considered relative and when the distinction between
good and evil was very simply perceived by the heart.

Still, some of us were recruited at that time, and I think that
if they had really put the pressure on, they could have broken
everybody’s resistance. So I would like to imagine: if, by the time
war broke out, I had already been wearing an NKVD officer’s
insignia on my blue tabs, what would I have become? Nowadays,
of course, I can console myself by saying that my heart wouldn’t
have stood it, that I would have objected and at some point
slammed the door. But later, lying on a prison bunk, I began to

162 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

look back over my actual career as an officer and I was horrified.

I did not move in one stride from being a student worn out by
mathematics to officer’s rank. Before becoming an officer I spent
a half-year as a downtrodden soldier. And one might think I
would have gotten through my thick skull what it was like always
to obey people who were perhaps not worthy of your obedience
and to do it on a hungry stomach to boot. Then for another half-
year they tore me to pieces in officer candidate school. So I ought
to have grasped, once and for all, the bitterness of service as a
rank-and-file soldier and remembered how my hide froze and how
it was flayed from my body. But did I? Not at all. For consolation,
they pinned two little stars on my shoulder boards, and then a
third, and then a fourth. And I forgot every bit of what it had been
like!

Had I at least kept my student’s love of freedom? But, you see,
we had never had any such thing. Instead, we loved forming up,
we loved marches.

I remember very well that right after officer candidate school
I experienced the happiness of simplification, of being a military
man and not having to think things through; the happiness of
being immersed in the life everyone else lived, that was accepted
in our military milieu; the happiness of forgetting some of the
spiritual subtleties inculcated since childhood.

We were constantly hungry in that school and kept looking
around to see where we could grab an extra bite, and we watched
one another enviously to see who was the cleverest. But most of
all we were afraid we wouldn’t manage to stay in until the time
came to graduate and receive our officer’s insignia. (They sent
those who failed to the battle for Stalingrad.) And they trained
us like young beasts, so as to infuriate us to the point where we
would later want to take it out on someone else. We never got
enough sleep because after taps, as punishment, we might be
forced to go through the drill alone under the eyes of a sergeant.
Or the entire squad might be routed out at night and made to
form up because of one uncleaned boot: there he is, the bastard,
and he’ll keep on cleaning it, and until he gets a shine on it you’re
all going to stay standing there.

In passionate anticipation of those insignia, we developed a
tigerlike stride and a metallic voice of command.

The Bluecaps | 163

Then the officer’s stars were fastened on our tabs. And only
one month later, forming up my battery in the rear, I ordered a
careless soldier named Berbenyev to march up and down after
taps under the eyes of my insubordinate Sergeant Metlin. (And
do you know, I had forgotten all about it until now. I honestly
forgot about it for years! Only now, seated in front of this sheet
of paper, have I remembered.) Some elderly colonel, who was an
inspector, happened to be there, and he called me in and put me
to shame. And I (and this after I'd left the university!) tried to
justify my action on the grounds that it was what we had been
taught in school. In other words, I meant: What humane views
can there be, given the fact that we are in the army?

(And the more so in the Organs.)

Pride grows in the human heart like lard on a pig.

I tossed out orders to my subordinates that I would not allow
them to question, convinced that no orders could be wiser. Even
at the front, where, one might have thought, death made equals of
us all, my power soon convinced me that I was a superior human
being. Seated there, I heard them out as they stood at attention.
I interrupted them. I issued commands. I addressed fathers and
grandfathers with the familiar, downgrading form of address—
while they, of course, addressed me formally. I sent them out to
repair wires under shellfire so that my superiors should not re-
proach me. (Andreyashin died that way.) I ate my officer’s
ration of butter with rolls, without giving a thought as to why I
had a right to it, and why the rank-and-file soldiers did not. I, of
course, had a personal servant assigned to me—in polite terms, an
“orderly’—whom I badgered one way or another and ordered
to look after my person and prepare my meals separately from the
soldiers’. (After all, the Lubyanka interrogators don’t have order-
lies—that’s one thing you can’t say about them.) I forced my
soldiers to put their backs into it and dig me a special dugout at
every new bivouac and to haul the heaviest beams to support it
so that I should be as comfortable and safe as possible. And wait
a minute, yes, my battery always had a guardhouse too. What
kind of guardhouse could there be in the woods? It was a pit, of
course, although a better one than those at the Gorokhovets
division camps which I have described, because it had a roof and
the man confined got a soldier’s ration. VWyushkov was imprisoned

164 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

there for losing his horse and Popkov for maltreating his carbine.
Yes, just a moment, I can remember more. They sewed me a map
case out of German hide—not human, but from a car seat. But I
didn’t have a strap for it, and I was unhappy about that. Then all
of a sudden they saw some partisan commissar, from the local
District Party Committee, wearing just the right kind of strap—
and they took it away from him: we are the army; we have sen-
iority! (Remember Senchenko, the Security officer, who stole a
map case and a dispatch case?) Finally, I coveted that scarlet
box, and I remember how they took it away and got it for me.

That’s what shoulder boards do to a human being. And where
have all the exhortations of grandmother, standing before an
ikon, gone! And where the young Pioneer’s daydreams of future
sacred Equality! |

And at the moment when my life was turned upside down and
the SMERSH officers at the brigade command point tore off those
cursed shoulder boards, and took my belt away and shoved me
along to their automobile, I was pierced to the quick by worrying
how, in my stripped and sorry state, I was going to make my way
through the telephone operator’s room. The rank and file must
not see me in that condition!

The day after my arrest my march of penance began: the most
recent “catch” was always sent from the army counterintelligence
center to the counterintelligence headquarters of the front. They
herded us on foot from Osterode to Brodnica.

When they led me out of the punishment cell, there were al-
ready seven prisoners there in three and a half pairs standing
with their backs to me. Six of them had on well-worn Russian
Army overcoats which had been around for a long time, and on
their backs had been painted, in indelible white paint, “SU,”
meaning “Soviet Union.” I already knew that mark, having seen
it more than once on the backs of our Russian POW’s as they
wandered sadly and guiltily toward the army that was approach-
ing to free them. They had been freed, but there was no shared
happiness in that liberation. Their compatriots glowered at them
even more grimly than at the Germans. And as soon as they
crossed the front lines, they were arrested and imprisoned.

The seventh prisoner was a German civilian in a black three-

The Bluecaps | 165

piece suit, a black overcoat, and black hat. He was over fifty,
tall, well groomed, and his white face had been nurtured on
gentleman’s food.

I completed the fourth pair, and the Tatar sergeant, chief
of the convoy, gestured to me to pick up my sealed suitcase,
which stood off to one side. It contained my officer’s equipment
as well as all the papers which had been seized as evidence when
I was arrested.

What did he mean, carry my suitcase? He, a sergeant, wanted
me, an officer, to pick up my suitcase and carry it? A large, heavy
object? Despite the new regulations? While beside me six men
from the ranks would be marching empty-handed? And one
representative of a conquered nation?

I did not express this whole complex set of ideas to the
sergeant. I merely said: “I am an officer. Let the German carry
it.”

None of the prisoners turned around at my words: turning
around was forbidden. Only my mate in the fourth pair, also an
“SU,” looked at me in astonishment. (When he had been cap-
tured, our army wasn’t yet like that.)

But the sergeant from counterintelligence was not surprised.
Even though I was not, of course, an officer in his eyes, still his _
indoctrination and mine coincided. He summoned the innocent
German and ordered him to carry the suitcase. It was just as
well the latter had not understood our conversation.

The rest of us put our hands behind our backs. The former
POW’s did not have even one bag among them. They had left the
Motherland with empty hands and that is exactly how they re-
turned to her. So our column marched off, four pairs in file. We
did not converse with our convoy. And it was absolutely forbid-
den to talk among ourselves whether on the march, during a halt,
or at overnight stops. As accused prisoners we were required to
move as though separated by invisible partitions, as though suf-
focated, each in his own solitary-confinement cell.

The early spring weather was changeable. At times a thin
mist hung in the air, and even on the firm highway the liquid mud
squelched dismally beneath our boots. At times the heavens
cleared and the soft yellow sun, still uncertain of its talent,
warmed the already thawing hillocks and showed us with perfect

166 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

clarity the world we were about to leave. At times a hostile squall
flew to the attack and tore from the black clouds a snow that was
not really even white, which beat icily on faces and backs and
feet, soaking through our overcoats and our footcloths.

Six backs ahead of me, six constant backs. There was more
than enough time to examine and re-examine the crooked, hide-
ous brands “SU” and the shiny black cloth on the German’s back.
There was more than enough time to reconsider my former life
and to comprehend my present one. But I couldn’t. I had been
smashed on the head with an oak club—but I still didn’t com-
prehend.

Six backs! There was neither approval nor condemnation in
their swing. |

The German soon tired. He shiited the suitcase from hand to
hand, grabbed at his heart, made signs to the convoy that he
couldn’t carry it any further. At that point his neighbor in the
pair, a POW who only a little while before had experienced God
knows what in German captivity (but, perhaps, mercy too), took
the suitcase of his own free will and carried it.

After that the other POW’s carried it in turn, also without
being ordered to; and then the German again.

All but me.

And no one said a word to me.

At one point we met a long string of empty carts. The drivers
studied us with interest, and some of them jumped up to full
height on top of the carts and stared. I understood very quickly
that their stares and their malice were directed toward me. I
was very sharply set off from the others: my coat was new, long,
and cut to fit my figure snugly. My tabs had not yet been torn off,
and in the filtered sunlight my buttons, also not cut off, burned
with the glitter of cheap gold. It was easy to see I was an officer,
with a look of newness, too, and newly taken into custody. Per-
haps this very fall from the heights stimulated them and gave
them pleasure, suggesting some gleam of justice, but more likely
they could not get it into their heads, stuffed with political in-
doctrination, that one of their own company commanders could
be arrested in this way, and they all decided unanimously I had
come from the other side.

“Aha, the Vlasov bastard got caught, did he! Shoot the rat!”

The Bluecaps | 167

They were vehement in their rear-line wrath (the most intense
patriotism always flourishes in the rear), and they added a good
deal more in mother oaths.

They regarded me as some kind of international operator who
had, nonetheless, been caught—and as a result the advance at
the front would move along faster and the war would come to an
end sooner.

How was I to answer them? I was forbidden to utter a single
word, and I would have had to explain my entire life to each and
every one of them. What could I do to make them understand
that I was not a spy, a saboteur? That I was their friend? That it
was because of them that I was here? I smiled. Looking up at
them, I smiled at them from a column of prisoners under escort!
But my bared teeth seemed to them the worst kind of mockery,
and they shook their fists and bellowed insults at me even more
violently than before.

I smiled in pride that I had been arrested not for stealing, nor
treason, nor desertion, but because I had discovered through my
power of reasoning the evil secrets of Stalin. I smiled at the
thought that I wanted, and might still be able, to effect some small
remedies and changes in our Russian way of life.

But all that time my suitcase was being carried by others.

And I didn’t even feel remorseful about it! And if my neighbor,
whose sunken cheeks were already covered with a soft two-week
growth of beard and whose eyes were filled to overflowing with
suffering and knowledge, had then and there reproached me in
the clearest of clear Russian words for having disgraced the honor
of a prisoner by appealing to the convoy for help and had accused
me of haughtiness, of setting myself above the rest of them, I
would not have understood him! I simply would not have under-
stood what he was talking about. I was an officer!

And if seven of us had to die on the way, and the eighth could
have been saved by the convoy, what was to keep me from crying
out: “Sergeant! Save me. I am an officer!”

And that’s what an officer is even when his shoulder boards
aren’t blue!

And if they are blue? If he has been indoctrinated to believe
that even among other officers he is the salt of the earth? And
that he knows more than others and is entrusted with more res-

168 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

ponsibility than others and that, consequently, it is his duty to
force a prisoner’s head between his legs, and then to shove him
like that into a pipe...

Why shouldn’t he?

I credited myself with unselfish dedication. But meanwhile I
had been thoroughly prepared to be an executioner. And if I had
gotten into an NK VD school under Yezhov, maybe I would have
matured just in time for Beria.

So let the reader who expects this book to be a political exposé
slam its covers shut right now.

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people
somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were neces-
sary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.
But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of
every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his
own heart?

During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place;
sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and some-
times it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One
and the same human being is, at various ages, under various cir-
cumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close
to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn’t
change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.

Socrates taught us: Know thyself!

Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those
who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all
only because of the way things worked out that they were the
executioners and we weren't.

If Malyuta Skuratov had summoned us, we, too, probably
would have done our work well!

From good to evil is one quaver, says the proverb.

And correspondingly, from evil to good.

From the moment when our society was convulsed by the
reminder of those illegalities and tortures, they began on all
sides to explain, to write, to protest: Good people were there too
—meaning in the NK VD-MGB!

We know which “good” people they are talking about: they
were the ones who whispered to the old Bolsheviks: “Don’t
weaken,” or even sneaked a sandwich in to them, and who
kicked all the rest around wherever they found them. But

The Bluecaps | 169

weren’t there also some who rose above the Party—who were
good in a general, human sense?

Broadly speaking, they should not have been there. The Organs
avoided employing such people, eliminating them at the recruit-
ment stage. And such people played their hand shrewdly so as
to get out of it.” Whoever got in by mistake either adjusted to
the milieu or else was thrown out, or eased out, or even fell
across the rails himself. Still . . . were there no good people leit
there?

In Kishinev, a young lieutenant gaybist went to Father Viktor
Shipovalnikov a full month before he was arrested: “Get away
from here, go away, they plan to arrest you!” (Did he do this on
his own, or did his mother send him to warn the priest?) After
the arrest, this young man was assigned to Father Viktor as an
escort guard. And he grieved for him: “Why didn’t you go
away?”

Or here’s another. I had a platoon commander named Lieuten-
ant Ovsyannikov. At the front no one was closer to me than he
was. During half the war we ate from the same pot; even under
enemy shellfire we would gulp down our food between explosions,
so the stew wouldn’t get cold. He was a peasant lad with a clean
soul and a view of life so undistorted that neither officer candidate
school nor being an officer had spoiled him in any degree. He even
did what he could to soften my hard edges in many ways.
Throughout his service as an officer he concentrated on one thing
only: preserving the lives and strength of his soldiers, many of
whom were no longer young. He was the first to tell me what the
Russian villages were like then and what the collective farms were
like. He talked about all this without resentment, without protest,
very simply and straightforwardly—just as a forest pool reflects
the image of a tree and all its branches, even the smallest. He was
deeply shocked by my arrest. He wrote me a combat reference
containing the highest praise and got the divisional commander
to sign it. After he was demobilized he continued to try to help
me, through my relatives. And this, mind you, was in 1947, which
was not very different from 1937. At my interrogation I had
many reasons to be afraid on his account, especially lest they

19. During the war, a certain Leningrad aviator, after being discharged from
the hospital in Ryazan, went to a TB clinic and begged: “Please find something

wrong with me! I’m under orders to go into the Organs!” The radiologists
dreamed up a touch of TB for him—and the Organs dropped him posthaste.

170 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

read my “War Diary,” which contained the stories he’d told me.
When I was rehabilitated in 1957, I very much wanted to find him.
I remembered his village address and wrote once, and then again,
but there was no reply. I discovered one thread I could follow—
that he had graduated from the Yaroslavl Pedagogical Institute.
When I inquired there, they replied: “He was sent to work in the
Organs of State Security.” Fine! All the more interesting! I wrote
to him at his city address, but there was no reply. Several years
passed and Ivan Denisovich was published. Well, I thought, now
he'll turn up. No! Three years later I asked one of my Yaroslavl
correspondents to go to him and personally hand him a letter. My
correspondent did as I asked and wrote me: “Evidently he has
never read Ivan Denisovich.” And truly, why should they know
how things go with prisoners after they've been sentenced? This
time Ovsyannikov couldn’t keep silent any longer. He wrote:
“After the Institute they offered me work in the Organs, and it
seemed to me I would be just as successful there.” (What did he
mean, successful?) “I cannot say that I have prospered remark-
ably in my new walk of life. There are some things I did not like,
but I work hard, and, if I am not mistaken, I shall not let my
comrades down.” (And that’s the justification—comradeship! )
He ended: “I no longer think about the future.”

And that is all. Allegedly, he had not received my previous
letters. Evidently, he doesn’t want to see me. (But if we had met,
I think this would have been a better chapter.) In Stalin’s last
years he had already become an interrogator—during those very
years when they handed out a twenty-five-year sentence to every-
one who came along. How did everything in his consciousness
recircuit itself? How did everything black out? But remembering
the once selfless, dedicated boy, as fresh as spring water, can I
possibly believe that everything in him changed beyond recall,
that there are no living tendrils left?

When the interrogator Goldman gave Vera Korneyeva the
“206” form on nondisclosure to sign, she began to catch on to
her rights, and then she began to go into the case in detail, involv-
ing as it did all seventeen members of their “religious group.”
Goldman raged, but he had to let her study the file. In order not
to be bored waiting for her, he led her to a large office, where
half a dozen employees were sitting, and left her there. At first

The Bluecaps | 171

she read quietly, but then a conversation began—perhaps because
the others were bored—and Vera launched aloud into a real
religious sermon. (One would have had to know her to ap-
preciate this to the full. She was a luminous person, with a
lively mind and a gift of eloquence, even though in freedom she
had been no more than a lathe operator, a stable girl, and a
housewife.) They listened to her impressively, now and then ask-
ing questions in order to clarify something or other. It was catch-
ing them from an unexpected side of things. People came in from
other offices, and the room filled up. Even though they were only
typists, stenographers, file clerks, and not interrogators, in 1946
this was still their milieu, the Organs. It is impossible to recon-
struct her monologue. She managed to work in all sorts of things,
including the question of “traitors of the Motherland.” Why were
there no traitors in the 1812 War of the Fatherland, when there
was still serfdom? It would have been natural to have traitors
then! But mostly she spoke about religious faith and religious
believers. Formerly, she declared, unbridled passions were the
basis for everything—‘Steal the stolen goods”—and, in that state
of affairs, religious believers were naturally a hindrance to you.
But now, when you want to build and prosper in this world, why
do you persecute your best citizens? They represent your most
precious material: after all, believers don’t need to be watched,
they do not steal, and they do not shirk. Do you think you can
build a just society on a foundation of self-serving and envious
people? Everything in the country is falling apart. Why do you
spit in the hearts of your best people? Separate church and state
properly and do not touch the church; you will not lose a thing
thereby. Are you materialists? In that case, put your faith in
education—in the possibility that it will, as they say, disperse
religious faith. But why arrest people? At this point Goldman
came in and started to interrupt rudely. But everyone shouted at
him: “Oh, shut up! Keep quiet! Go ahead, woman, talk.” (And
how should they have addressed her? Citizeness? Comrade?
Those forms of address were forbidden, and these people were
bound by the conventions of Soviet life. But “woman”—that was
how Christ had spoken, and you couldn’t go wrong there.) And
Vera continued in the presence of her interrogator.

So there in the MGB office those people listened to Korneyeva

172 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

—and why did the words of an insignificant prisoner touch them
so near the quick?

That same D. Terekhov I mentioned earlier remembers to this
day the first prisoner he sentenced to death. “I was sorry for him.”
His memory obviously clings to something that came from his
heart. (But after that first one, he forgot many and no longer
kept count any more. )”°

No matter how icy the jailers in the Big House in Leningrad,
the innermost nucleus of the nucleus of the heart—for a nucleus
has its own nucleus—had to continue to exist, did it not?
N. P va recalls the time when she was being taken to inter-
rogation by an impassive, silent woman guard with unseeing eyes
—when suddenly the bombs began to explode right next to the
Big House and it sounded as if at the next moment they would
fall directly on them. The terrified guard threw her arms around
her prisoner and embraced her, desperate for human companion-
ship and sympathy. Then the bombing stopped. And her eyes
became unseeing again. “Hands behind your back! Move along.”

Well, of course, there was no great merit in that—to become
a human being at the moment of death. Similarly, loving one’s
own children is no proof of virtue. (People often try to excuse
scoundrels by saying: “He’s a good family man!”) The Chairman
of the Supreme Court, I. T. Golyakov, is praised: he enjoyed
digging in his garden, he loved books, he used to browse around
used- and rare-book stores, he knew the work of Tolstoi, Koro-
lenko, and Chekhov. Well, what did he learn from them? How
many thousands did he destroy? Or, for example, that colonel,
Konkordiya Iosse’s friend, who had roared with laughter in the
Vladimir Detention Prison at the memory of locking up a group
of old Jews in an ice-filled root cellar, had been afraid of one
thing only during all his debaucheries: that his wife might find
out about them. She believed in him, regarded him as noble, and
this faith of hers was precious to him. But do we dare accept that
feeling as a bridgehead to virtue in his heart?

20. An episode with Terekhov: Attempting to prove to me the fairness of the
judicial system under Khrushchev, he energetically struck the plate-glass desk
top with his hand and cut his wrist on the edge. He rang for help. His subordi-
nates were at the ready. The senior officer on duty brought him iodine and
hydrogen peroxide. Continuing the conversation, he helplessly held dampened
cotton to the wound: it appears that his blood coagulates poorly. And thus
God showed him clearly the limitations of the human being! And he had de-
livered verdicts, imposed death sentences on others.

The Bluecaps | 173

And why is it that for nearly two hundred years the Security
forces have hung onto the color of the heavens? That was what
they wore in Lermontov’s lifetime—‘“and you, blue uniforms!”
Then came blue service caps, blue shoulder boards, blue tabs, and
then they were ordered to make themselves less conspicuous,
and the blue brims were hidden from the gratitude of the people
and everything blue on heads and shoulders was made narrower
—until what was left was piping, narrow rims. . . but still blue.

Is this only a masquerade?

Or is it that even blackness must, every so often, however
rarely, partake of the heavens?

It would be beautiful to think so. But when one learns, for
example, the nature of Yagoda’s striving toward the sacred...
An eyewitness from the group around Gorky, who was close to
Yagoda at the time, reports that in the vestibule of the bathhouse
on Yagoda’s estate near Moscow, ikons were placed so that
Yagoda and his comrades, after undressing, could use them as
targets for revolver practice before going in to take their baths.

Just how are we to understand that? As the act of an evildoer?
What sort of behavior is it? Do such people really exist?

We would prefer to say that such people cannot exist, that
there aren’t any. It is permissible to portray evildoers in a story
for children, so as to keep the picture simple. But when the great
world literature of the past—Shakespeare, Schiller, Dickens—in-
flates and inflates images of evildoers of the blackest shades, it
seems somewhat farcical and clumsy to our contemporary per-
ception. The trouble lies in the way these classic evildoers are
pictured. They recognize themselves as evildoers, and they know
their souls are black. And they reason: “I cannot live unless I do
evil. So Pll set my father against my brother! PH drink the vic-
tim’s sufferings until Pm drunk with them!” Iago very precisely
identifies his purposes and his motives as being black and born
of hate.

But no; that’s not the way it is! To do evil a human being must
first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a
well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately,
it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his
actions.

Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience
devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagina-

174 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

tion and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped
short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.

Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justifica-
tion and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and deter-
mination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts
seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he
won't hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and
honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their
wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands,
by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by
civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late),
by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.

Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experi-
ence evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot
be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed. How, then, do we
dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that de-
stroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been
no Archipelago.

There was a rumor going the rounds between 1918 and 1920
that the Petrograd Cheka, headed by Uritsky, and the Odessa
Cheka, headed by Deich, did not shoot all those condemned to
death but fed some of them alive to the animals in the city zoos.
I do not know whether this is truth or calumny, or, if there were
any such cases, how many there were. But I wouldn't set out to
look for proof, either. Following the practice of the bluecaps, I
would propose that they prove to us that this was impossible.
How else could they get food for the zoos in those famine years?
Take it away from the working class? Those enemies were going
to die anyway, so why couldn’t their deaths support the zoo
economy of the Republic and thereby assist our march into the
future? Wasn't it expedient?

That is the precise line the Shakespearean evildoer could not
cross. But the evildoer with ideology does cross it, and his eyes
remain dry and clear.

Physics is aware of phenomena which occur only at threshold
magnitudes, which do not exist at all until a certain threshold
encoded by and known to nature has been crossed. No matter
how intense a yellow light you shine on a lithium sample, it will
not emit electrons. But as soon as a weak bluish light begins to
glow, it does emit them. (The threshold of the photoelectric effect

The Bluecaps | 175

has been crossed.) You can cool oxygen to 100 degrees below
zero Centigrade and exert as much pressure as you want, it does
not yield, but remains a gas. But as soon as minus 183 degrees is
reached, it liquefies and begins to flow.

Evidently evildoing also has a threshold magnitude. Yes, a
human being hesitates and bobs back and forth between good
and evil all his life. He slips, falls back, clambers up, repents,
things begin to darken again. But just so long as the threshold of
evildoing is not crossed, the possibility of returning remains, and
he himself is still within reach of our hope. But when, through
the density of evil actions, the result either of their own extreme
degree or of the absoluteness of his power, he suddenly crosses
that threshold, he has left humanity behind, and without, perhaps,
the possibility of return.

From the most ancient times justice has been a two-part concept:
virtue triumphs, and vice is punished.

We have been fortunate enough to live to a time when virtue,
though it does not triumph, is nonetheless not always tormented
by attack dogs. Beaten down, sickly, virtue has now been allowed
to enter in all its tatters and sit in the corner, as long as it doesn’t
raise its voice.

However, no one dares say a word about vice. Yes, they did
mock virtue, but there was no vice in that. Yes, so-and-so many
millions did get mowed down—but no one was to blame for it.
And if someone pipes up: “What about those who . . .” the answer
comes from all sides, reproachfully and amicably at first: “What
are you talking about, comrade! Why open old wounds?”
Then they go after you with an oaken club: “Shut up! Haven't
you had enough yet? You think you’ve been rehabilitated!”

In that same period, by 1966, eighty-six thousand Nazi crimi-
nals had been convicted in West Germany.” And still we choke

21. Even in connection with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the
retired bluecaps living on pensions objected because the book might reopen
the wounds of those who had been imprisoned in camp. Allegedly, they were the
ones to be protected.

22. Meanwhile, in East Germany, nothing of the sort is to be heard. Which
means that there they have been shod with new shoes; they are valued in the
service of the state.

176 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

with anger here. We do not hesitate to devote to the subject page
after newspaper page and hour after hour of radio time. We even
stay after work to attend protest meetings and vote: “Too few!
Eighty-six thousand are too few. And twenty years is too little!
It must go on and on.”

And during the same period, in our own country (according
to the reports of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court)
about ten men have been convicted.

What takes place beyond the Oder and the Rhine gets us all
worked up. What goes on in the environs of Moscow and behind
the green fences near Sochi, or the fact that the murderers of our
husbands and fathers ride through our streets and we make way
for them as they pass, doesn’t get us worked up at all, doesn’t
touch us. That would be “digging up the past.”

Meanwhile, if we translate 86,000 West Germans into our own
terms, on the basis of comparative population figures, it would
become one-quarter of a million.

But in a quarter-century we have not tracked down anyone.
We have not brought anyone to trial. It is their wounds we are
afraid to reopen. And as a symbol of them all, the smug and
stupid Molotov lives on at Granovsky No. 3, a man who has
learned nothing at all, even now, though he is saturated with
our blood and nobly crosses the sidewalk to seat himself in his
long, wide automobile.

Here is a riddle not for us contemporaries to figure out: Why
is Germany allowed to punish its evildoers and Russia is not?
What kind of disastrous path lies ahead of us if we do not have
the chance to purge ourselves of that putrefaction rotting inside
our body? What, then, can Russia teach the world?

In the German trials an astonishing phenomenon takes place
from time to time. The defendant clasps his head in his hands,
refuses to make any defense, and from then on asks no conces-
sions from the court. He says that the presentation of his crimes,
revived and once again confronting him, has filled him with
revulsion and he no longer wants to live.

That is the ultimate height a trial can attain: when evil is so
utterly condemned that even the criminal is revolted by it.

A country which has condemned evil 86,000 times from the
rostrum of a court and irrevocably condemned it in literature

The Bluecaps | 177

and among its young people, year by year, step by step, is purged
of it.

What are we to do? Someday our descendants will describe
our several generations as generations of driveling do-nothings.
First we submissively allowed them to massacre us by the mil-
lions, and then with devoted concern we tended the murderers
in their prosperous old age.

What are we to do if the great Russian tradition of penitence
is incomprehensible and absurd to them? What are we to do if
the animal terror of hearing even one-hundredth part of all they
subjected others to outweighs in their hearts any inclination to
justice? If they cling greedily to the harvest of benefits they have
watered with the blood of those who perished?

It is clear enough that those men who turned the handle of the
meat grinder even as late as 1937 are no longer young. They are
fifty to eighty years old. They have lived the best years of their
lives prosperously, well nourished and comfortable, so that it is
too late for any kind of equal retribution as far as they are con-
cerned.

But let us be generous. We will not shoot them. We will not
pour salt water into them, nor bury them in bedbugs, nor bridle
them into a “swan dive,” nor keep them on sleepless “stand-up”
for a week, nor kick them with jackboots, nor beat them with
rubber truncheons, nor squeeze their skulls in iron rings, nor
push them into a cell so that they lie atop one another like pieces
of baggage—we will not do any of the things they did! But for
the sake of our country and our children we have the duty to
seek them all out and bring them all to trial! Not to put them on
trial so much as their crimes. And to compel each one of them to
announce loudly:

“Yes, I was an executioner and a murderer.”

And if these words were spoken in our country only one-
quarter of a million times (a just proportion, if we are not to fall
behind West Germany), would it, perhaps, be enough?

It is unthinkable in the twentieth century to fail to distinguish
between what constitutes an abominable atrocity that must be
prosecuted and what constitutes that “past” which “ought not to
be stirred up.”

We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people

178 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

have the right to repress others. In keeping silent about evil, in
burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the
surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold
in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we
are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby
ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.
It is for this reason, and not because of the “weakness of indoc-
trinational work,” that they are growing up “indifferent.” Young
people are acquiring the conviction that foul deeds are never
punished on earth, that they always bring prosperity.

It is going to be uncomfortable, horrible, to live in such a
country!

Chapter 5

First Cell, First Love

How is one to take the title of this chapter? A cell and love
in the same breath? Ah, well, probably it has to do with Lenin-
grad during the blockade—and you were imprisoned in the Big
House. In that case it would be very understandable. That’s why
you are still alive—because they shoved you in there. It was the
best place in Leningrad—not only for the interrogators, who
even lived there and had offices in the cellars in case of shelling.
Joking aside, in Leningrad in those days no one washed and
everyone’s face was covered with a black crust, but in the Big
House prisoners were given a hot shower every tenth day. Well,
it’s true that only the corridors were heated—for the jailers. The
cells were left unheated, but after all, there were water pipes in
the cells that worked and a toilet, and where else in Leningrad
could you find that? And the bread ration was just like the ration
outside—barely four and a half ounces. In addition, there was
broth made from slaughtered horses once a day! And thin gruel
once a day as well!

It was a case of the cat’s being envious of the dog’s life! But
what about punishment cells? And what about the “supreme
measure” —execution? No, that isn’t what the chapter title is
about.

Not at all.

You sit down and half-close your eyes and try to remember
them all. How many different cells you were imprisoned in during

179

180 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

your term! It is difficult even to count them. And in each one
there were people, people. There might be two people in one,
150 in another. You were imprisoned for five minutes in one
and all summer long in another.

But in every case, out of all the cells you’ve been in, your first
cell is a very special one, the place where you first encountered
others like yourself, doomed to the same fate. All your life you
will remember it with an emotion that you otherwise experience
only in remembering your first love. And those people, who
shared with you the floor and air of that stone cubicle during
those days when you rethought your entire life, will from time to
time be recollected by you as members of your own family.

Yes, in those days they were your only family.

_What you experience in your first interrogation cell parallels
nothing in your entire previous life or your whole subsequent
life. No doubt prisons have stood for thousands of years before
you came along, and may continue to stand after you too—
longer than one would like to think—but that first interrogation
cell is unique and inimitable.

Maybe it was a terrible place for a human being. A lice-laden,
bedbug-infested lock-up, without windows, without ventilation,
without bunks, and with a dirty floor, a box called a KPZ’ in the
village soviet, at the police station, in the railroad station, or in
some port. (The KPZ’s and the DPZ’s are scattered across the
face of our land in the greatest abundance. There are masses of
prisoners in them.) Or maybe it was “solitary” in the Archangel
prison, where the glass had been smeared over with red lead so
that the only rays of God’s maimed light which crept in to you
were crimson, and where a 15-watt bulb burned constantly in the
ceiling, day and night. Or “solitary” in the city of Choibalsan,
where, for six months at a time, fourteen of you were crowded
onto seven square yards of floor space in such a way that you
could only shift your bent legs in unison. Or it was one of the
Lefortovo “psychological” cells, like No. 111, which was painted
black and also had a day-and-night 25-watt bulb, but was in all
other respects like every other Lefortovo cell: asphalt floor; the
heating valve out in the corridor where only the guards had access

1. KPZ = Cell for Preliminary Detention. DPZ = House of Preliminary
Detention. In other words, where interrogations are conducted, not where
sentences are served.

First Cell, First Love | 181

to it; and, above all, that interminable irritating roar from the
wind tunnel of the neighboring Central Aero- and Hydrodynamics
Institute—a roar one could not believe was unintentional, a roar
which would make a bowl or cup vibrate so violently that it would
slip off the edge of the table, a roar which made it useless to
converse and during which one could sing at the top of one’s
lungs and the jailer wouldn’t even hear. And then when the roar
stopped, there would ensue a sense of relief and felicity superior
to freedom itself.

But it was not the dirty floor, nor the murky walls, nor the
odor of the latrine bucket that you loved—but those fellow
prisoners with whom you about-faced at command, and that
something which beat between your heart and theirs, and their
sometimes astonishing words, and then, too, the birth within you,
on that very spot, of free-floating thoughts you had so recently
been unable to leap up or rise to.

And how much it had cost you to last out until that first cell!
You had been kept in a pit, or in a box, or in a cellar. No one
had addressed a human word to you. No one had looked at you
with a human gaze. All they did was to peck at your brain and
heart with iron beaks, and when you cried out or groaned, they
laughed.

For a week or a month you had been an abandoned waif, alone
among enemies, and you had already said good-bye to reason
and to life; and you had already tried to kill yourself by “falling”
from the radiator in such a way as to smash your brains against
the iron cone of the valve.” Then all of a sudden you were alive
again, and were brought in to your friends. And reason returned
to you.

That’s what your first cell is!

You waited for that cell. You dreamed of it almost as eagerly
as of freedom. Meanwhile, they kept shoving you around between
cracks in the wall and holes in the ground, from Lefortovo into
some legendary, diabolical Sukhanovka.

Sukhanovka was the most terrible prison the MGB had. Its
very name was used to intimidate prisoners; interrogators would
hiss it threateningly. And you’d not be able to question those who
had been there: either they were insane and talking only discon-
nected nonsense, or they were dead.

2. Alexander D.

182 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

Sukhanovka was a former monastery, dating back to Catherine
the Great. It consisted of two buildings—one in which prisoners
served out their terms, and the other a structure that contained
sixty-eight monks’ cells and was used for interrogations. The
journey there in a Black Maria took two hours, and only a hand-
ful of people knew that the prison was really just a few miles
from Lenin’s Gorki estate and near the former estate of Zinaida
Volkonskaya. The countryside surrounding it was beautiful.

There they stunned the newly arrived prisoner with a stand-up
punishment cell again so narrow that when he was no longer
able to stand he had to sag, supported by his bent knees propped
against the wall. There was no alternative. They kept prisoners
thus for more than a day to break their resistance. But they ate
tender, tasty food at Sukhanovka, which was like nothing else
in the MGB—because it was brought in from the Architects’
Rest Home. They didn’t maintain a separate kitchen to prepare
hogwash. However, the amount one architect would eat—includ-
ing fried potatoes and meatballs—was divided among twelve
prisoners. As a result the prisoners were not only always hungry
but also exceedingly irritable.

The cells were all built for two, but prisoners under interroga-
tion were usually kept in them singly. The dimensions were five
by six and a half feet.* Two little round stools were welded to
the stone floor, like stumps, and at night, if the guard unlocked

3. To be absolutely precise, they were 156 centimeters by 209 centimeters.
How do we know? Through a triumph of engineering calculation and a strong
heart that even Sukhanovka could not break. The measurements were the work
of Alexander D., who would not allow them to drive him to madness or despair.
He resisted by striving to use his mind to calculate distances. In Lefortovo he
counted steps, converted them into kilometers, remembered from a map how
many kilometers it was from Moscow to the border, and then how many across
all Europe, and how many across the Atlantic Ocean. He was sustained in this
by the hope of returning to America. And in one year in Lefortovo solitary he
got, so to speak, halfway across the Atlantic. Thereupon they took him to Su-
khanovka. Here, realizing how few would survive to tell of it—and all our in-
formation about it comes from him—he invented a method of measuring the
cell, The numbers 10/22 were stamped on the bottom of his prison bowl, and
he guessed that “10” was the diameter of the bottom and “22” the diameter of
the outside edge. Then he pulled a thread from a towel, made himself a tape
measure, and measured everything with it. Then he began to invent a way of
sleeping standing up, propping his knees against the small chair, and of deceiv-
ing the guard into thinking his eyes were open. He succeeded in this deception,
a that ice how he managed not to go insane when Ryumin kept him sleepless

or a month.

First Cell, First Love | 183

a cylinder lock, a shelf dropped from the wall onto each stump
and remained there for seven hours (in other words, during the
hours of interrogation, since there was no daytime interrogation
at Sukhanovka at all), and a little straw mattress large enough
for a child also dropped down. During the day, the stool was
exposed and free, but one was forbidden to sit on it. In addition,
a table lay, like an ironing board, on four upright pipes. The
“fortochka” in the window—the small hinged pane for ventilation
—was always closed except for ten minutes in the morning when
the guard cranked it open. The glass in the little window was
reinforced. There were never any exercise periods out of doors.
Prisoners were taken to the toilet at 6 A.M. only—i.e., when no
one’s stomach needed it. There was no toilet period in the eve-
ning. There were two guards for each block of seven cells, so
that was why the prisoners could be under almost constant in-
spection through the peephole, the only interruption being the
time it took the guard to step past two doors to a third. And that
was the purpose of silent Sukhanovka: to leave the prisoner not
a single moment for sleep, not a single stolen moment for privacy.
You were always being watched and always in their power.

But if you endured the whole duel with insanity and all the
trials of loneliness, and had stood firm, you deserved your first
cell! And now when you got into it, your soul would heal.

If you had surrendered, if you had given in and betrayed every-
one, you were also ready for your first cell. But it would have
been better for you not to have lived until that happy moment
and to have died a victor in the cellar, without having signed a
single sheet of paper.

Now for the first time you were about to see people who were
not your enemies. Now for the first time you were about to see
others who were alive,* who were traveling your road, and whom
you could join to yourself with the joyous word “we.”

Yes, that word which you may have despised out in freedom,
when they used it as a substitute for your own individuality
(“All of us, like one man!” Or: “We are deeply angered!” Or:

4. And if this was in the Big House in Leningrad during the siege, you may
also have seen cannibals. Those who had eaten human flesh, those who had
traded in human livers from dissecting rooms, were for some reason kept by
the MGB with the political prisoners.

184 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

“We demand!” Or: “We swear!”), is now revealed to you as
something sweet: you are not alone in the world! Wise, spiritual
beings—human beings—still exist.

I had been dueling for four days with the interrogator, when the
jailer, having waited until I lay down to sleep in my blindingly
lit box, began to unlock my door. I heard him all right, but
before he could say: “Get up! Interrogation!” I wanted to lie for
another three-hundredths of a second with my head on the pillow
and pretend I was sleeping. But, instead of the familiar command,
the guard ordered: “Get up! Pick up your bedding!”
Uncomprehending, and unhappy because this was my most
precious time, I wound on my footcloths, put on my boots, my
overcoat, my winter cap, and clasped the government-issue mat-
tress in my arms. The guard was walking on tiptoe and kept
signaling me not to make any noise as he led me down a corridor
silent as the grave, through the fourth floor of the Lubyanka, past
the desk of the section supervisor, past the shiny numbers on the
cells and the olive-colored covers of the peepholes, and unlocked
Cell 67. I entered and he locked it behind me immediately.
Even though only a quarter of an hour or so had passed since
the signal to go to sleep had been given, the period allotted the
prisoners for sleeping was so fragile, and undependable, and brief
that, by the time I arrived, the inhabitants of Cell 67 were already
asleep on their metal cots with their hands on top of the blankets.’
At the sound of the door opening, all three started and raised
their heads for an instant. They, too, were waiting to learn which
of them might be taken to interrogation.
And those three lifted heads, those three unshaven, crumpled
5. New measures of oppression, additions to the traditional prison regula-
tions, were invented only gradually in the internal prisons of the GPU-NKVD-
MGB. At the beginning of the twenties, prisoners were not subjected to this
particular measure, and lights were turned off at night as in the ordinary world.
But they began to keep the lights on, on the logical grounds that they needed
to keep the prisoners in view at all times. (When they used to turn the lights
on for inspection, it had been even worse.) Arms had to be kept outside the
blanket, allegedly to prevent the prisoner from strangling himself beneath the
blanket and thus escaping his just interrogation. It was demonstrated experi-

mentally that in the winter a human being always wants to keep his arms under
the bedclothes for warmth; consequently the measure was made permanent.

First Cell, First Love | 185

pale faces, seemed to me so human, so dear, that I stood there,
hugging my mattress, and smiled with happiness. And they
smiled. And what a forgotten look that was—after only one
week!

“Are you from freedom?” they asked me. (That was the
question customarily put to a newcomer. )

“Nooo,” I replied. And that was a newcomer’s usual first reply.

They had in mind that I had probably been arrested recently,
which meant that I came from freedom. And I, after ninety-six
hours of interrogation, hardly considered that I was from “free-
dom.” Was I not already a veteran prisoner? Nonetheless I was
from freedom. The beardless old man with the black and very
lively eyebrows was already asking me for military and political
news. Astonishing! Even though it was late February, they knew
nothing about the Yalta Conference, nor the encirclement of
East Prussia, nor anything at all about our own attack below
Warsaw in mid-January, nor even about the woeful December
retreat of the Allies. According to regulations, those under inter-
rogation were not supposed to know anything about the outside
world. And here indeed they didn’t!

I was prepared to spend half the night telling them all about
it—with pride, as though all the victories and advances were the
work of my own hands. But at this point the duty jailer brought
in my cot, and I had to set it up without making any noise. I
was helped by a young fellow my own age, also a military man.
His tunic and aviator’s cap hung on his cot. He had asked me,
even before the old man spoke, not for news of the war but for
tobacco. But although I felt openhearted toward my new friends,
and although not many words had been exchanged in the few
minutes since I joined them, I sensed something alien in this
front-line soldier who was my contemporary, and, as far as he
was concerned, I clammed up immediately and forever.

(I had not yet even heard the word “nasedka”—“stool pigeon”
—nor learned that there had to be one such “stool pigeon” in
each cell. And I had not yet had time to think things over and
conclude that I did not like this fellow, Georgi Kramarenko. But
a spiritual relay, a sensor relay, had clicked inside me, and it had
closed him off from me for good and all. I would not bother to
recall this event if it had been the only one of its kind. But soon,

186 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

with astonishment, and alarm, I became aware of the work of
this internal sensor relay as a constant, inborn trait. The years
passed and I lay on the same bunks, marched in the same forma-
tions, and worked in the same work brigades with hundreds of
others. And always that secret sensor relay, for whose creation
I deserved not the least bit of credit, worked even before I remem-
bered it was there, worked at the first sight of a human face and
eyes, at the first sound of a voice—so that I opened my heart to
that person either fully or just the width of a crack, or else shut
myself off from him completely. This was so consistently un-
failing that all the efforts of the State Security officers to employ
stool pigeons began to seem to me as insignificant as being
pestered by gnats: after all, a person who has undertaken to be
a traitor always betrays the fact in his face and in his voice, and
even though some were more skilled in pretense, there was always
something fishy about them. On the other hand, the sensor relay
helped me distinguish those to whom I could from the very begin-
ning of our acquaintance completely disclose my most precious
depths and secrets—secrets for which heads roll. Thus it was
that I got through eight years of imprisonment, three years of
exile, and another six years of underground authorship, which
were in no wise less dangerous. During all those seventeen years
I recklessly revealed myself to dozens of people—and didn’t
make a misstep even once. (I have never read about this trait
anywhere, and I mention it here for those interested in psy-
chology. It seems to me that such spiritual sensors exist in many
of us, but because we live in too technological and rational an age,
we neglect this miracle and don’t allow it to develop.)

We set up the cot, and I was then ready to talk—in a whisper,
of course, and lying down, so as not to be sent from this cozy
nest into a punishment cell. But our third cellmate, a middle-
aged man whose cropped head already showed the white bristles
of imminent grayness, peered at me discontentedly and said with
characteristic northern severity: “Tomorrow! Night is for sleep-
ing.”

That was the most intelligent thing to do. At any minute,
one of us could have been pulled out for interrogation and held
until 6 A.M., when the interrogator would go home to sleep but
we were forbidden to.

First Cell, First Love | 187

One night of undisturbed sleep was more important than all
the fates on earth!

One more thing held me back, which I didn’t quite catch right
away but had felt nonetheless from the first words of my story,
although I could not at this early date find a name for it: As
each of us had been arrested, everything in our world had
switched places, a 180-degree shift in all our concepts had oc-
curred, and the good news I had begun to recount with such
enthusiasm might not be good news for us at all.

My cellmates turned on their sides, covered their eyes with
their handkerchiefs to keep out the light from the 200-watt bulb,
wound towels around their upper arms, which were chilled from
lying on top of the blankets, hid their lower arms furtively
beneath them, and went to sleep.

And I lay there, filled to the brim with the joy of being among
them. One hour ago I could not have counted on being with
anyone. I could have come to my end with a bullet in the back
of my head—which was what the interrogator kept promising
me—without having seen anyone at all. Interrogation still hung
over me, but how far it had retreated! Tomorrow I would be
telling them my story (though not talking about my case, of
course) and they would be telling me their stories too. How
interesting tomorrow would be, one of the best days of my life!
(Thus, very early and very clearly, I had this consciousness that
prison was not an abyss for me, but the most important turning
point in my life.)

Every detail of the cell interested me. Sleep fled, and when
the peephole was not in use I studied it all furtively. Up there
at the top of one wall was a small indentation the length of
three bricks, covered by a dark-blue paper blind. They had al-
ready told me it was a window. Yes, there was a window in the
cell. And the blind served as an air-raid blackout. Tomorrow
there would be weak daylight, and in the middle of the day they
would turn off the glaring light bulb. How much that meant—to
have daylight in daytime!

There was also a table in the cell. On it, in the most con-
spicuous spot, were a teapot, a chess set, and a small pile of
books. (I was not yet aware why they were so conspicuously
positioned. It turned out to be another example of the Lubyanka

188 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

system at work. During his once-a-minute peephole inspection,
the jailer was supposed to make sure that the gifts of the prison
administration were not being misused: that the teapot was not
being used to break down the wall; that no one was swallowing
the chessmen and thereby possibly cashing in his chips and
ceasing to be a citizen of the U.S.S.R.; and that no one was
starting a fire with the books in the hope of burning down the
whole prison. And a prisoner’s eyeglasses were considered so
potentially dangerous that they were not allowed to remain on
the table during the night; the prison administration took them
away until morning.)

What a cozy life! Chess, books, cots with springs, decent
mattresses, clean linen. I could not remember having slept like
this during the whole war. There was a worn parquet floor. One
could take nearly four strides from window to door in the aisle
between the cots. No, indeed! This central political prison was
a real resort.

And no shells were falling. I remembered their sounds: the
high-pitched sobbing way up overhead, then the rising whistle,
and the crash as they burst. And how tenderly the mortar shells
whistled. And how everything trembled from the four blasts of
what we called “Dr. Goebbels’ mortar-rockets.” And I remem-
bered the wet snow and mud near Wormditt, where I had been
arrested, which our men were still wading through to keep the
Germans from breaking out of our encirclement.

All right then, the hell with you; if you don’t want me to fight,
I won't.

Among our many lost values there is one more: the high worth
of those people who spoke and wrote Russian before us. It is odd
that they are almost undescribed in our prerevolutionary litera-
ture. Only very rarely do we feel their breath—from Marina
Tsvetayeva, or from “Mother Mariya” (in her Recollections of
Blok). They saw too much to settle on any one thing. They
reached toward the sublime too fervently to stand firmly on the
earth. Before societies fall, just such a stratum of wise, thinking
people emerges, people who are that and nothing more. And how
they were laughed at! How they were mocked! As though they

First Cell, First Love | 189

stuck in the craw of people whose deeds and actions were single-
minded and narrow-minded. And the only nickname they were
christened with was “rot.” Because these people were a flower
that bloomed too soon and breathed too delicate a fragrance.
And so they were mowed down.

These people were particularly helpless in their peronai lives:
they could neither bend with the wind, nor pretend, nor get by;
every word declared an opinion, a passion, a protest. And it was
just such people the mowing machine cut down, just such people
the chaff-cutter shredded.°®

They had passed through these very same cells. But the cell
walls—for the wallpaper had long since been stripped off, and
they had been plastered, whitewashed, and painted more than
once—gave off nothing of the past. (On the contrary, the walls
now tried to listen to us with hidden microphones.) Nowhere is
anything written down or reported of the former inhabitants of
these cells, of the conversations held in them, of the thoughts
with which earlier inmates went forth to be shot or to imprison-
ment on the Solovetsky Islands. And now such a volume, which
would be worth forty freight car loads of our literature, will in
all probability never be written.

Those still alive recount to us all sorts of trivial details: that
there used to be wooden trestle beds here and that the mattresses
were stuffed with straw. That, way back in 1920, before they put
muzzles over the windows, the panes were whitewashed up to
the top. By 1923 “muzzles” had been installed (although we
unanimously ascribed them to Beria). They said that back in the
twenties, prison authorities had been very lenient toward pris-
oners communicating with each other by “knocking” on the walls:
this was a carry-over from the stupid tradition in the Tsarist
prisons that if the prisoners were deprived of knocking, they
would have no way to occupy their time. And another thing:
back in the twenties all the jailers were Latvians, from the
Latvian Red Army units and others, and the food was all handed
out by strapping Latvian women.

All this was trivial detail, but it was certainly food for thought.

I myself had needed very badly to get into this main Soviet

6. I am almost fearful of saying it, but it seems as though on the eve of the
1970’s these people are emerging once again. That is surprising. It was almost
too much to hope for.

190 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

political prison, and I was grateful that I had been sent here: I
thought about Bukharin a great deal and I wanted to picture the
whole thing as it had actually been. However, I had the impres-
sion that we were by now merely the remnants, and that in this
respect we might just as well have been in any provincial
“internal” prison.’ Still, there was a good deal of status in being
here.

And there was no reason to be bored with my companions in
my new cell. They were people to listen to and people with whom
to compare notes.

The old fellow with the lively eyebrows—and at sixty-three
he in no way bore himself like an old man—was Anatoly Ilyich
Fastenko. He was a big asset to our Lubyanka cell—both as a
keeper of the old Russian prison traditions and as a living history
of Russian revolutions. Thanks to all that he remembered, he
somehow managed to put in perspective everything that had
taken place in the past and everything that was taking place in
the present. Such people are valuable not only in a cell. We
badly need them in our society as a whole.

Right there in our cell we read Fastenko’s name in a book
about the 1905 Revolution. He had been a Social Democrat for
such a long, long time that in the end, it seemed, he had ceased to
be one.

He had been sentenced to his first prison term in 1904 while
still a young man, but he had been freed outright under the
“manifesto” proclaimed on October 17, 1905.°

His story about that amnesty was interesting. In those years,

7. One attached to a State Security headquarters.

8. Who among us has not learned by heart from our school history courses,
as well as from the Short Course in the history of the Soviet Communist Party,
that this “provocative and foul manifesto” was a mockery of freedom, that the
Tsar had proclaimed: “Freedom for the dead, and prison for the living”? But
the epigram was bogus. The manifesto declared that all political parties were
to be tolerated and that a State Duma was to be convened, and it provided for
an amnesty which was honest and extremely extensive. (The fact that it had
been issued under duress was something else again.) Indeed, under its terms
none other than all political prisoners without exception were to be released
without reference to the term and type of punishment they had been sentenced
to. Only criminals remained imprisoned. The Stalin amnesty of July 7, 1945—
true, it was not issued under duress—was exactly the opposite. All the political
prisoners remained imprisoned.

First Cell, First Love | 191

of course, there were no muzzles on the prison windows, and
from the cells of the Belaya Tserkov Prison in which Fastenko
was being held the prisoners could easily observe the prison
courtyard and the street, and all arrivals and departures, and
they could shout back and forth as they pleased to ordinary
citizens outside. During the day of October 17, these outsiders,
having learned of the amnesty by telegraph, announced the news
to the prisoners. In their happiness the political prisoners went
wild with joy. They smashed windowpanes, broke down doors,
and demanded that the prison warden release them immediately.
And were any of them kicked right in the snout with jackboots?
Or put in punishment cells? Or was anyone deprived of library
and commissary privileges? Of course not! In his distress, the
warden ran from cell to cell and implored them: “Gentlemen!
I beg of you, please be reasonable! I don’t have the authority to
release you on the basis of a telegraphed report. I must have
direct orders from my superiors in Kiev. Please, I beg of you.
You will have to spend the night here.” And in actual fact they
were most barbarously kept there for one more day.’

On getting back their freedom, Fastenko and his comrades
immediately rushed to join the revolution. In 1906 he was
sentenced to eight years at hard labor, which meant four years
in irons and four in exile. He served the first four years in the
Sevastopol Central Prison, where, incidentally, during his stay,
a mass escape was organized from outside by a coalition of
revolutionary parties: the SR’s, the Anarchists, and the Social
Democrats. A bomb blew a hole in the prison wall big enough
for a horse and rider to go through, and two dozen prisoners—
not everyone who wanted to escape, but those who had been
chosen ahead of time by their parties and, right inside the prison,
had been equipped with pistols by the jailers—fled through the
hole and escaped. All but one: Anatoly Fastenko was selected
by the Russian Social Democratic Party not to escape but to
cause a disturbance in order to distract the attention of the
guards.

On the other hand, when he reached exile in the Yenisei area,

9. After Stalin’s amnesty, as I will recount later, those amnestied were held
in prison for another two or three months and were forced to slog away just
as before. And no one considered this illegal.

192 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

he did not stay there long. Comparing his stories (and later those
of others who had survived) with the well-known fact that under
the Tsar our revolutionaries escaped from exile by the hundreds
and hundreds, and more and more of them went abroad, one
comes to the conclusion that the only prisoners who did not
escape from Tsarist exile were the lazy ones—because it was so
easy. Fastenko “escaped,” which is to say, he simply left his
place of exile without a passport. He went to Vladivostok, ex-
pecting to get aboard a steamer through an acquaintance there.
Somehow it did not work out. So then, still without a passport,
he calmly crossed the whole of Mother Russia on a train and went
to the Ukraine, where he had been a member of the Bolshevik
underground and where he had first been arrested. There he was
given a false passport, and he left to cross the Austrian border.
That particular step was so routine, and Fastenko felt himself
so safe from pursuit, that he was guilty of an astonishing piece
of carelessness. Having arrived at the border, and having turned
in his passport to the official there, he suddenly discovered he
could not remember his new name. What was he to do? There
were forty passengers altogether and the official had already
begun to call off their names. Fastenko thought up a solution. He
pretended to be asleep. He listened as the passports were handed
back to their owners, and he noted that the name Makarov was
called several times without anyone responding. But even at this
point he was not absolutely certain it was his name. Finally, the
dragon of the imperial regime bent down to the underground
revolutionary and politely tapped him on the shoulder: “Mr.
Makarov! Mr. Makarov! Please, here is your passport!”

Fastenko headed for Paris. There he got to know Lenin and
Lunacharsky and carried out some administrative duties at the
Party school at Longjumeau. At the same time he studied French,
looked around him, and decided that he wanted to travel farther
and see the world. Before the war he went to Canada, where he
worked for a while, and he spent some time in the United States
as well. He was astonished by the free and easy, yet solidly
established life in these countries, and he concluded that they
would never have a proletarian revolution and even that they
hardly needed one.

Then, in Russia, the long-awaited revolution came, sooner

First Cell, First Love | 193

than expected, and everyone went back to Russia, and then there
was one more Revolution. Fastenko no longer felt his former
passion for these revolutions. But he returned, compelled by the
same need that urges birds to their annual migrations.*°

There was much about Fastenko I could not yet understand.
In my eyes, perhaps the main thing about him, and the most
surprising, was that he had known Lenin personally. Yet he was
quite cool in recalling this. (Such was my attitude at the time
that when someone in the cell called Fastenko by his patronymic
alone, without using his given name—in other words simply
“Ilyich,” asking: “Ilyich, is it your turn to take out the latrine
bucket?”—-I was utterly outraged and offended because it seemed
sacrilege to me not only to use Lenin’s patronymic in the same
sentence as “latrine bucket,” but even to call anyone on earth
“Ilyich” except that one man, Lenin.) For this reason, no doubt,
there was much that Fastenko would have liked to explain to me
that he still could not bring himself to.

Nonetheless, he did say to me, in the clearest Russian: “Thou
shalt not make unto thee any graven image!” But I failed to
understand him!

Observing my enthusiasm, he more than once said to me
insistently: “You're a mathematician; it’s a mistake for you to
forget that maxim of Descartes: ‘Question everything!’ Ques-
tion everything!” What did this mean—“everything”? Certainly
not everything! It seemed to me that I had questioned enough
things as it was, and that was enough of that!

Or he said: “Hardly any of the old hard-labor political pris-

10. Soon after Fastenko returned to the Motherland, he was followed by
a Canadian acquaintance, a former sailor on the battleship Potemkin, one of the
mutineers, in fact, who had escaped to Canada and become a well-to-do
farmer there. This former Potemkin sailor sold everything he owned, his farm
and cattle, and returned to his native region with his money and his new
tractor to help build sacred socialism. He enlisted in one of the first agricultural
communes and donated his tractor to it. The tractor was driven any which way
by whoever happened along and was quickly ruined. And the former Potemkin
sailor saw things turning out very differently from the way he had pictured
them for twenty years. Those in charge were incompetents, issuing orders that
any sensible farmer could see were wild nonsense. In addition, he became
skinnier and skinnier, and his clothes wore out, and nothing was left of the
Canadian dollars he had exchanged for paper rubles. He begged to be allowed
to leave with his family, and he crossed the border as poor as when he fied
from the Potemkin. He crossed the ocean, just as he had done then, working

his way as a sailor, because he had no money for passages, and back in Canada
he began life all over again as a hired hand on a farm.

194 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

oners of Tsarist times are left. I am one of the last. All the hard-
labor politicals have been destroyed, and they even dissolved
our society in the thirties.” “Why?” I asked. “So we would not
get together and discuss things.” And although these simple
words, spoken in a calm tone, should have been shouted to the
heavens, should have shattered windowpanes, I understood them
only as indicating one more of Stalin’s evil deeds. It was a trouble-
some fact, but without roots.

One thing is absolutely definite: not everything that enters
our ears penetrates our consciousness. Anything too far out of
tune with our attitude is lost, either in the ears themselves or
somewhere beyond, but it is lost. And even though I clearly re-
member Fastenko’s many stories, I recall his opinions but
vaguely. He gave me the names of various books which he
strongly advised me to read whenever I got back to freedom. In
view of his age and his health, he evidently did not count on
getting out of prison alive, and he got some satisfaction from
hoping that I would someday understand his ideas. I couldn’t
write down the list of books he suggested, and even as it was there
was a great deal of prison life for me to remember, but I at least
remembered those titles which were closest to my taste then:
Untimely Thoughts by Gorky (whom I regarded very highly at
that time, since he had, after all, outdone all the other classical
Russian writers in being proletarian) and Plekhanov’s A Year
in the Motherland.

Today, when I read what Plekhanov wrote on October 28,
1917, I can clearly reconstruct what Fastenko himself thought:

. .. I am disappointed by the events of the last days not because I
do not desire the triumph of the working class in Russia but precisely
because I pray for it with all the strength of my soul... . [We must]
remember Engels’ remark that there could be no greater historical
tragedy for the working class than to seize political power when it is
not ready for it. [Such a seizure of power] would compel it to retreat
far back from the positions which were won in February and March of
the present year. 1!

When Fastenko returned to Russia, pressure was put on him,
out of respect for his old underground exploits, to accept an

11. G. V. Plekhanov, “An Open Letter to the Workers of Petrograd,” in
the newspaper Yedinstvo, October 28, 1917.

First Cell, First Love | 195

important position. But he did not want to; instead, he accepted
a modest post on the newspaper Pravda and then a still more
modest one, and eventually he moved over to the Moscow City
Planning office, where he worked in an inconspicuous job.

I was surprised. Why had he chosen such a cul-de-sac? He ex-
plained in terms I found incomprehensible. “You can’t teach
an old dog to live on a chain.”

Realizing that there was nothing he could accomplish, Fastenko
quite simply wanted, in a very human way, to stay alive. He had
already gotten used to living on a very small pension—not one of
the “personal” pensions especially assigned by the government,
because to have accepted that sort of thing would have called
attention to his close ties to many who had been shot. And he
might have managed to survive in this way until 1953. But, to
his misfortune, they arrested another tenant in his apartment, a
debauched, perpetually drunken writer, L. S——v, who had
bragged somewhere while he was drunk about owning a pistol.
Owning a pistol meant an obligatory conviction for terrorism,
and Fastenko, with his ancient Social Democratic past, was
naturally the very picture of a terrorist. Therefore, the interroga-
tor immediately proceeded to nail him for terrorism and, simul-
taneously, of course, for service in the French and Canadian
intelligence services and thus for service in the Tsarist Okhrana
as well.*? And in 1945, to earn his fat pay, the fat interrogator
was quite seriously leafing through the archives of the Tsarist
provincial gendarmerie administrations, and composing entirely
serious interrogation depositions about conspiratorial nicknames,
passwords, and secret rendezvous and meetings in 1903.

On the tenth day, which was as soon as was permitted, his
old wife (they had no children) delivered to Anatoly Ilyich such
parcels as she could manage to put together: a piece of black
bread weighing about ten and a half ounces (after all, it had
been bought in the open market, where bread cost 50 rubles a
pound), and a dozen peeled boiled potatoes which had been
pierced by an awl when the parcel was being inspected. And the

12. This was one of Stalin’s pet themes—to ascribe to every arrested Bol-
shevik, and in general to every arrested revolutionary, service in the Tsarist
Okhrana. Was this merely his intolerant suspiciousness? Or was it intuition?
Or, perhaps, analogy? .. .

196 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

sight of those wretched—and truly sacred—parcels tore at one’s
heartstrings.

That was what this human being had earned for sixty-three
years of honesty and doubts.

The four cots in our cell left an aisle in the middle, where the
table stood. But several days after my arrival, they put a fifth per-
son in with us and inserted a cot crosswise.

They brought in the newcomer an hour before rising time—
that brief, sweetly cerebral last hour, and three of us did not lift
our heads. Only Kramarenko jumped up, to sponge some to-
bacco, and maybe, with it, some material for the interrogator.
They began to converse in a whisper, and we tried not to listen.
But it was quite impossible not to overhear the newcomer’s
whisper. It was so loud, so disquieting, so tense, and so close to a
sob, that we realized it was no ordinary grief that had entered
our cell. The newcomer was asking whether many were shot.
Nonetheless, without turning my head, I called them down, asking
them to talk more quietly.

When, on the signal to rise, we all instantly jumped up (lying
abed earned you the punishment cell), we saw a general, no
less! True, he wasn’t wearing any insignia of rank, not even
tabs—nor could one see where his insignia had been torn off
or unscrewed, but his expensive tunic, his soft overcoat, indeed
his entire figure and face, told us that he was unquestionably
a general, in fact a typical general, and most certainly a full
general, and not one of your run-of-the-mill major generals. He
was short, stocky, very broad of shoulder and body, and notably
fat in the face, but this fat, which had been acquired by eating
well, endowed him, not with an appearance of good-natured
accessibility, but with an air of weighty importance, of affiliation
with the highest ranks. The crowning part of his face was, to be
sure, not the upper portion, but the lower, which resembled a
bulldog’s jaw. It was there that his energy was concentrated,
along with his will and authoritativeness, which were what had
enabled him to attain such rank by early middle age.

We introduced ourselves, and it turned out that L. V. Z——v

First Cell, First Love | 197

was even younger than he appeared. He would be thirty-six that
year—“If they don’t shoot me.” Even more surprisingly, it de-
veloped that he was not a general at all, not even a colonel, and
not even a military man—but an engineer!

An engineer? I had grown up among engineers, and I could
remember the engineers of the twenties very well indeed: their
open, shining intellects, their free and gentle humor, their agility
and breadth of. thought, the ease with which they shifted from
one engineering field to another, and, for that matter, from
technology to social concerns and art. Then, too, they personified
good manners and delicacy of taste; well-bred speech that flowed
evenly and was free of uncultured words; one of them might
play a musical instrument, another dabble in painting; and their
faces always bore a spiritual imprint.

From the beginning of the thirties I had lost contact with
that milieu. Then came the war. And here before me stood—an
engineer, one of those who had replaced those destroyed.

No one could deny him one point of superiority. He was much
stronger, more visceral, than those others had been. His shoulders
and hands retained their strength even though they had not
needed it for a long time. Freed from the restraints of courtesy,
he stared sternly and spoke impersonally, as if he didn’t even
consider the possibility of a dissenting view. He had grown up
differently from those others too, and he worked differently.

His father had plowed the earth in the most literal sense.
Lenya Z——v~v had been one of those disheveled, unenlightened
peasant boys whose wasted talents so distressed Belinsky and
Tolstoi. He was certainly no Lomonosov, and he could never
have gotten to the Academy on his own, but he was talented. If
there had been no revolution, he would have plowed the land,
and he would have become well-to-do because he was energetic
and active, and he might have raised himself into the merchant
class.

It being the Soviet period, however, he entered the Komsomol,
and his work in the Komsomol, overshadowing his other talents,
lifted him out of anonymity, out of his lowly state, out of the
countryside, and shot him like a rocket through the Workers’
School right into the Industrial Academy. He arrived there in
1929—at the very moment when those other engineers were

198 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

being driven in whole herds into Gulag. It was urgently necessary
for those in power to produce their own engineers—politically-
conscious, loyal, one-hundred percenters, who were to become
bigwigs of production, Soviet businessmen, in fact, rather than
people who did things themselves. That was the moment when
the famous commanding heights overlooking the as-yet-uncreated
industries were empty. And it was the fate of Z——-v’s class in
the Industrial Academy to occupy them.

Z——v’s life became a chain of triumphs, a garland wind-
ing right up to the peak. Those were the exhausting years, from
1929 to 1933, when the civil war was being waged, not as in
1918 to 1920 with tachankas—machine guns mounted on horse-
drawn carts—but with police dogs, when the long lines of those
dying of famine trudged toward the railroad stations in the hope
of getting to the cities, which was where the breadgrains were
evidently ripening, but were refused tickets and were unable to
leave—and lay dying beneath the station fences in a submissive
human heap of homespun coats and bark shoes. In those same
years Z——-v not only did not know that bread was rationed to
city dwellers but, at a time when a manual laborer was receiving
60 rubles a month in wages, he enjoyed a student’s scholarship
of 900 rubles a month. Z——v’s heart did not ache for the
countryside whose dust he had shaken from his feet. His new life
was already soaring elsewhere among the victors and the leaders.

He never had time to be an ordinary, run-of-the-mill foreman.
He was immediately assigned to a position in which he had
dozens of engineers and thousands of workers under him. He was
the chief engineer of the big construction projects outside Mos-
cow. From the very beginning of the war he, of course, had an
exemption from military service. He was evacuated to Alma-Ata,
together with the department he worked for, and in this area he
bossed even bigger construction projects on the Ili River. But
in this case his workers were prisoners. The sight of those little
gray people bothered him very little at the time, nor did it in-
spire him to any reappraisals nor compel him to take a closer
look. In that gleaming orbit in which he circled, the only im-
portant thing was to achieve the projected totals, fulfillment of
the plan. And it was quite enough for Z——v merely to punish
a particular construction unit, a particular camp, and a par-

First Cell, First Love | 199

ticular work superintendent—after that, it was up to them to
manage to fulfill their norm with their own resources. How many
hours they had to work to do it or what ration they had to get
along on were details that didn’t concern him.

The war years deep in the rear were the best years in Z——v’s
life. Such is the eternal and universal aspect of war: the more
grief it accumulates at one of its poles, the more joy it generates
at the other. Z——v had not only a bulldog’s jaw but also a
swift, enterprising, businesslike grasp. With the greatest skill he
immediately switched to the economy’s new wartime rhythm.
Everything for victory. Give and take, and the war will write it
all off. He made just one small concession to the war. He got
along without suits and neckties, and, camouflaging himself in
khaki color, had chrome-leather boots made to order and donned
a general’s tunic—the very one in which he appeared before us.
That was fashionable and not uncommon at the time. It provoked
neither anger in the war-wounded nor reproachful glances from
women.

Women usually looked at him with another sort of glance.
They came to him to get well fed, to get warmed up, to have
some fun. He had wild money passing through his hands. His
billfold bulged like a little barrel with expense money, and to
him ten-ruble notes were like kopecks, and thousands like single
rubles. Z——-v didn’t hoard them, regret spending them, or
keep count of them. He counted only the women who passed
through his hands, and particularly those he had “uncorked.”
This count was his sport. In the cell he assured us that his arrest
had broken off the count at 290 plus, and he regretted that he
had not reached 300. Since it was wartime and the women were
alone and lonely. And since, in addition to his power and money,
he had the virility of a Rasputin, one can probably believe him.
And he was quite prepared to describe one episode after another.
It was just that our ears were not prepared to listen to him. Even
though no danger threatened him during those last years, he had
frantically grabbed these women, messed them up, and then
thrown them away, like a greedy diner eating boiled crayfish—
grabbing one, devouring it, sucking it, then grabbing the next.

He was so accustomed to the malleability of material, to his
own vigorous boarlike drive across the land! (Whenever he was

200 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

especially agitated, he would dash about the cell like a powerful
boar who might just knock down an oak tree in his path.) He
was so accustomed to an environment in which all the leaders
were his own kind of people, in which one could always make a
deal, work things out, cover them up! He forgot that the more
success one gains, the more envy one arouses. As he found out
during his interrogation, a dossier had been accumulating against
him since way back in 1936, on the basis of an anecdote he had
carelessly told at a drunken party. More denunciations had fol-
lowed, and more testimony from agents (after all, one has to
take women to restaurants, where all types of people see you! ).
Another report pointed out that he had been in no hurry to leave
Moscow in 1941, that he had been waiting for the Germans. He
had in actual fact stayed on longer than he should have, ap-
parently because of some woman. Z v took great care to keep
his business deals clean. But he quite forgot the existence of
Article 58. Nonetheless, the avalanche might not have over-
whelmed him had he not grown overconfident and refused to
supply building materials for a certain prosecutor’s dacha. That
was what caused his dormant case to awaken and tremble and
start rolling. (And this was one more instance of the fact that
cases begin with the material self-interest of the blueboys. )

The scope of Z——v’s concepts of the world can be judged
by the fact that he believed there was a Canadian language.
During the course of two months in the cell, he did not read a
single book, not even a whole page, and if he did read a para-
graph, it was only to be distracted from his gloomy thoughts
about his interrogation. It was clear from his conversation that he
had read even less in freedom. He knew of Pushkin—as the hero
of bawdy stories. And of Tolstoi he knew only, in all probability,
that he was—a Deputy of the Supreme Soviet!

On the other hand, was he a one hundred percent loyal Com-
munist? Was he that same socially-conscious proletarian who
had been brought up to replace Palchinsky and von Meck and
their ilk? This was what was really surprising—he was most cer-
tainly not! We once discussed the whole course of the war with
him, and I said that from the very first moment I had never had
any doubts about our victory over the Germans. He looked at
me sharply; he did not believe me. “Come on, what are you
saying?” And then he took his head in his hands. “Oh, Sasha,

First Cell, First Love | 201

Sasha, and I was convinced the Germans would win! That’s what
did me in!” There you are! He was one of the “organizers of
victory,” but each day he believed in the Germans’ success and
awaited their inevitable arrival. Not because he loved them, but
simply because he had so sober an insight into our economy
(which I, of course, knew nothing about and therefore believed
in).

All of us in the cell were deeply depressed, but none of us
was so crushed as Z——-v, none took his arrest as so profound
a tragedy. He learned from us that he would get no more than a
tenner, that during his years in camp he would, of course, be a
work superintendent, and that he would not have to experience
real suffering, as indeed he never did. But this did not comfort
him in the least. He was too stricken by the collapse of such a
glorious life. After all, it was his one and only life on earth, and
no one else’s, which had interested him all his thirty-six years.
And more than once, sitting on his cot in front of the table,
propping his pudgy head on his short, pudgy arm, he would start
to sing quietly, in a singsong voice and with lost, befogged eyes:

Forgotten and abandoned
Since my young, early years,
I was left a tiny orphan....

He could never get any further than that. At that point, he would
break into explosive sobs. All that bursting strength which could
not break through the walls that enclosed him he turned inward,
toward self-pity.

And toward pity for his wife. Every tenth day (since oftener
was not allowed) his wife, long since unloved, brought him rich
and bountiful food parcels—the whitest of white bread, butter,
red caviar, veal, sturgeon. He would give each of us a sandwich
and a twist of tobacco and then bend down to the provisions he
had set before himself, delighting in odors and colors that con-
trasted vividly with the bluish potatoes of the old underground
revolutionary Fastenko. Then his tears would start to pour again,
redoubled. He recalled out loud his wife’s tears, whole years of
tears: some due to love notes she had found in his trousers, some
to some woman’s underpants in his overcoat pocket, stuffed
there hurriedly in his automobile and forgotten. And when he
was thus torn by burning self-pity, his armor of evil energy fell

202 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

away, and before us was a ruined and clearly a good person.
I was astonished that he could sob so. The Estonian Arnold
Susi, our cellmate with the gray bristles in his hair, explained it
to me: “Cruelty is invariably accompanied by sentimentality.
It is the law of complementaries. For example, in the case of the
Germans, the combination is a national trait.”

Fastenko, on the other hand, was the most cheerful person
in the cell, even though, in view of his age, he was the only one
who could not count on surviving and returning to freedom.
Flinging an arm around my shoulders, he would say:

To stand up for the truth is nothing!
For truth you have to sit in jail!

Or else he taught me to sing this song from Tsarist hard-labor
days:

And if we have to perish

In mines and prisons wet,

Our cause will ever find renown
In future generations yet.

And I believe this! May these pages help his faith come true!
a

The sixteen-hour days in our cell were short on outward events,
but they were so interesting that I, for example, now find a mere
sixteen minutes’ wait for a trolley bus much more boring. There
were no events worthy of attention, and yet by evening I would
sigh because once more there had not been enough time, once
more the day had flown. The events were trivial, but for the first
time in my life I learned to look at them through a magnifying
glass.

The most difficult hours in the day were the first two. At the
rattle of the key in the lock (for at the Lubyanka there were no
“swill troughs,”** and it was necessary to unlock the door even

13. Special large openings in the cell doors of many Russian prisons [known
to the prisoners as “kormushki,” meaning “swill troughs” or “fodder bins”).
Their lids dropped down to make tiny tables. Conversations with the jailers were
carried on through these openings, food was handed through, and prison papers
were shoved through for the prisoners to sign.

First Cell, First Love | 203

to shout: “Time to get up!”), we jumped up without lingering,
made our beds, and sat down on them feeling empty and helpless,
with the electric light still burning. This enforced wakefulness
from 6 A.M. on—at a time when the brain was still lazy from
sleep, the whole world seemed repulsive and all of life wrecked,
and there was not a gulp of air in the cell—was particularly
ludicrous for those who had been under interrogation all night
and had only just been able to get to sleep. But don’t try to steal
extra sleep! If you should try to doze off, leaning slightly against
the wall, or propped over the table as if studying the chessboard,
or relaxing over a book lying conspicuously open on your knees,
the key would sound a warning knock on the door, or, worse yet,
the door with that rattling lock would suddenly open silently,
since the Lubyanka jailers were specially trained to do just that,
and like a spirit passing through a wall, the swift and silent
shadow of the junior sergeant would take three steps into the
cell, hook onto you as you slept, and maybe take you off to
the punishment cell; or maybe they would take book privileges
away from the whole cell or deprive everyone of their daily walk
—a cruel, unjust punishment for all, and there were other punish-
ments, too, in the black lines of the prison regulations. Read
them! They hang in every cell. If, incidentally, you needed
glasses to read, then you wouldn’t be reading books or the
sacred regulations either during those two starving hours. Eye-
glasses were taken away every night, and it was evidently still
“dangerous” for you to have them during those two hours when
no one brought anything to the cell, and no one came to it. No
one asked about anything, and no one was summoned—the inter-
rogators were still sleeping sweetly. And the prison administra-
tion was just opening its eyes, coming to. Only the vertukhai,
the turnkeys, were active and energetic, opening the peephole
cover once a minute for inspection.**

But one procedure was carried out during those two hours: the
morning trip to the toilet. When the guard roused us, he made
an important announcement. He designated the person from our

14. During my time this word “vertukhai” had already come into wide
currency for the jailers. It was said to have originated with Ukrainian guards
who were always ordering: “Stoi, ta ne vertukhais!” And yet it is also worth
recalling the English word for jailer, “turnkey,” is “verti klyuch” in Russian.
Perhaps a “vertukhai” here in Russia is also “one who turns the key.”

204 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

cell who was to be entrusted with the responsibility of carrying
out the latrine bucket. (In more isolated, ordinary prisons the
prisoners had enough freedom of speech and self-government to
decide this question themselves. But in the Chief Political Prison
such an important event could not be left to chance.) So then
you formed up in single file, hands behind your backs, and, at
the head of the line, the responsible latrine-bucket-bearer carried
chest high the two-gallon tin pail with a lid on it. When you
reached your goal, you were locked in again, each having first
been handed a small piece of paper, the size of two railway tickets.
(At the Lubyanka this was not particularly interesting. The paper
was blank and white. But there were enticing prisons where they
gave you pages of books—and what reading that was! You could
try to guess whence it came, read it over on both sides, digest the
contents, evaluate the style—and when words had been cut in
half that was particularly essential! You could trade with your
comrades. In some places they handed out pages from the once
progressive Granat Encyclopedia, and sometimes, it’s awful to
say it, from the classics, and I don’t mean belles-lettres either.
Visits to the toilet thus became a means of acquiring knowledge. )

But there’s not that much to laugh at. We are dealing with
that crude necessity which it is considered unsuitable to refer to
in literature (although there, too, it has been said, with immortal
adroitness: “Blessed is he who early in the morning . . .”). This
allegedly natural start of the prison day set a trap for the prisoner
that would grip him all day, a trap for his spirit—which was
what hurt. Given the lack of physical activity in prison, and the
meager food, and the muscular relaxation of sleep, a person was
just not able to square accounts with nature immediately after
rising. Then they quickly returned you to the cell and locked you
up—until 6 P.M., or, in some prisons, until morning. At that
point, you would start to get worried and worked up by the ap-
proach of the daytime interrogation period and the events of the
day itself, and you would be loading yourself up with your bread
ration and water and gruel, but no one was going to let you visit
that glorious accommodation again, easy access to which free
people are incapable of appreciating. This debilitating, banal need
could make itself felt day after day shortly after the morning
toilet trip and would then torment you the whole day long, op-

First Cell, First Love | 205

press you, rob you of the inclination to talk, read, think, and
even of any desire to eat the meager food.

People in the cells sometimes discussed how the Lubyanka
system and schedule, and those in other prisons as well, had come
into being, whether through calculated brutality or as a matter
of chance. My opinion is that both factors are involved. The
rising time is, obviously, a matter of malicious intent, but much
of the rest evolved automatically at first (which is true of many
of the brutalities of life generally) and was then discovered by
the powers that be to be useful and was therefore made permanent.
The shifts change at 8 A.M. and 8 P.M., and it was more con-
venient for everyone to take the prisoners to the toilet at the end
of a shift. (Letting them out singly in the middle of the day was
extra trouble and meant extra precautions, and no one got paid
for that.) The same was true of the business with eyeglasses: Why
should one worry about that at 6 A.M.? They could be returned
to the owners just before the end of the shift instead.

So now we heard them being brought around—doors were
being opened. We could guess whether someone wore them in the
cell next door. (And didn’t your codefendant wear spectacles?
But we didn’t feel up to knocking out a message on the wall.
This was punished very severely.) A moment later they would
bring the eyeglasses to our cell. Fastenko used them only for
reading. But Susi needed them all the time. He could stop squint-
ing once he’d put them on. Thanks to his horn-rimmed glasses
and straight lines above the eyes, his face became severe, per-
spicacious, exactly the face of an educated man of our century as
we might picture it to ourselves. Back before the Revolution he
had studied at the Faculty of History and Philology of the Uni-
versity of Petrograd, and throughout his twenty years in inde-
pendent Estonia he had preserved intact the purest Russian
speech, which he spoke like a native. Later, in Tartu, he had
studied law. In addition to Estonian, he spoke English and Ger-
man, and through all these years he continued to read the London
Economist and the German scientific “Berichte” summaries. He
had studied the constitutions and the codes of law of various _
countries—and in our cell he represented Europe worthily and
with restraint. He had been a leading lawyer in Estonia and been
known as “kuldsuu”—meaning “golden-tongued.”

206 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

There was new activity in the corridor. A free-loader in a gray
smock—a husky young fellow who had certainly not been at the
front—brought a tray with our five bread rations and ten lumps
of sugar. Our cell stoolie hovered over them, even though we
would inevitably cast lots for them—which we did because every
least detail of this was important: the heel of the loaf, for instance,
and the number of smaller pieces needed to make the total weight
come out right, and how the crust adheres, or doesn’t, to the
inside of the bread—and it was better that fate should decide."
But the stoolie felt he just had to hold everything in his hands for
at least a second so that some bread and sugar molecules would
cling to his palms.

That pound of unrisen wet bread, with its swamplike sogginess
of texture, made half with potato flour, was our crutch and the
main event of the day. Life had begun! The day had begun—this
was when it began! And everyone had countless problems. Had
he allocated his bread ration wisely the day before? Should he
cut it with a thread? Or break it up greedily? Or slowly, quietly
nip off pieces one by one? Should he wait for tea or pile into it
right now? Should he leave some for dinner or finish it off at
lunch? And how much?

In addition to these wretched dilemmas, what wide-ranging
discussions and arguments went on (for our tongues had been
liberated and with bread we were once more men) provoked by
this one-pound chunk in our hand, consisting more of water than
of grain. (Incidentally, Fastenko explained that the workers of
Moscow were eating the very same bread at that time.) And, gen-
erally speaking, was there any real breadgrain in this bread at all?
And what additives were in it? (There was at least one person in
every cell who knew all about additives, for, after all, who hadn’t
eaten them during these past decades?) Discussions and remi-
niscences began. About the white bread they had baked back in
the twenties—springy round loaves, like sponge cake inside, with
a buttery reddish-brown top crust and a bottom crust that still
had a trace of ash from the coals of the hearth—that bread had

15. Where indeed in our country did this casting of lots not happen? It was
the result of our universal and endless hunger. In the army, all rations were
divided up the same way. And the Germans, who could hear what was going
on from their trenches, teased us about it: “Who gets it? The political com-
missar!”

First Cell, First Love | 207

vanished for good! Those born in 1930 would never know what
bread is. Friends, this is a forbidden subject! We agreed not to
say one word about food.

Once again there was movement in the corridor—tea was being
brought around. A new young tough in a gray smock carrying
pails. We put our teapot out in the corridor and he poured
straight into it from a pail without a spout—into the teapot and
onto the runner and the floor beneath it. And the whole corridor
was polished like that of a first-class hotel.*®

And that was all they gave us. Whatever cooked food we got
would be served at 1 P.M. and at 4 P.M., one meal almost on the
heels of the other. You could then spend the next twenty-one
hours remembering it. (And that wasn’t prison brutality either: it
was simply a matter of the kitchen staff having to do its work as
quickly as possible and leave.)

At nine o’clock the morning check-up took place. For a long
while beforehand, we could hear especially loud turns of the key
and particularly sharp knocks on the doors. Then one of the duty
lieutenants for the whole floor would march forward and enter,
almost as erect as if he were standing at attention. He would take
two steps forward and look sternly at us. We would be on our
feet. (We didn’t even dare remember that political prisoners were
once not required to rise.) It was no work at all to count us—
he could do it in a glance—but this was a moment for testing our
rights. For we did have some rights, after all, although we did not
really know them, and it was his job to hide them from us. The
whole strength of the Lubyanka training showed itself in a totally
machinelike manner: no expression on the face, no inflection, not
a superfluous word.

And which of our rights did we know about? A request to have
our shoes repaired. An appointment with the doctor. Although
if they actually took you to the doctor, you would not be happy

16. Soon the biologist Timofeyev-Ressovsky, whom I have already men-
tioned, would be brought here from Berlin. There was nothing at the Lubyanka,
it appeared, which so offended him as this spilling on the floor. He considered it
striking evidence of the lack of professional pride on the part of the jailers,
and of all of us in our chosen work. He multiplied the 27 years of Lubyanka’s
existence as a prison by 730 times (twice for each day of the year), and then
by 111 cells—and he would seethe for a long time because it was easier to
spill boiling water on the floor 2,188,000 times and then come and wipe it up
with a rag the same number of times than to make pails with spouts.

208 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

about the consequences. There the machinelike Lubyanka manner
would be particularly striking. He didn’t ask: “What’s your
trouble?” That would take too many words, and one couldn’t
pronounce the phrase without any inflection. He would ask curtly:
“Troubles?” And if you began to talk at too great length about
your ailment, he would cut you off. It was clear anyway. A tooth-
ache? Extract it. You could have arsenic. A filling? We don’t
fill teeth here. (That would have required additional appoint-
ments and created a somewhat humane atmosphere. )

The prison doctor was the interrogators and executioner’s
right-hand. man. The beaten prisoner would come to on the floor
only to hear the doctor’s voice: “You can continue, the pulse is
normal.” After a prisoner’s five days and nights in a punishment
cell the doctor inspects the frozen, naked body and says: “You
can continue.” If a prisoner is beaten to death, he signs the death
certificate: “Cirrhosis of the liver” or “Coronary occlusion.” He
gets an urgent call to a dying prisoner in a cell and he takes his
time. And whoever behaves differently is not kept on in the
prison."

But our stoolie was better informed about his rights. ( Accord-
ing to him he had already been under interrogation eleven months.
And he was taken to interrogation only during the day.) He spoke
up and asked for an appointment with the prison chief. What, the
chief of the whole Lubyanka? Yes. His name was taken down.
(And in the evening, after taps, when the interrogators were al-
ready in their offices, he was summoned. And he returned with
some makhorka.) This was very crude, of course, but so far they
had not been able to think up anything better. It would have been
a big expense to convert entirely to microphones in the walls and
impossible to listen in on all 111 cells for whole days at a time.
Who would do it? Stool pigeons were cheaper and would continue
to be used for a long time to come. But Kramarenko had a hard
time with us. Sometimes he eavesdropped so hard that the sweat
poured from him, and we could see from his face that he didn’t
understand what we were saying.

There was one additional right—the privilege of writing appli-
cations and petitions (which replaced freedom of the press, of
assembly, and of the ballot, all of which we had lost when we

17. Dr. F. P. Gaaz would have earned nothing extra in our country.

First Cell, First Love | 209

left freedom). Twice a month the morning duty officer asked:
“Who wants to write a petition?” And they listed everyone who
wanted to. In the middle of the day they would lead you to an
individual box and lock you up in it. In there, you could write
whomever you pleased: the Father of the Peoples, the Central
Committee of the Party, the Supreme Soviet, Minister Beria,
Minister Abakumov, the General Prosecutor, the Chief Military
Prosecutor, the Prison Administration, the Investigation Depart-
ment. You could complain about your arrest, your interrogator,
even the chief of the prison! In each and every case your petition
would have no effect whatever. It would not be stapled into any
file, and the most senior official to read it would be your own
interrogator. However, you were in no position to prove this. In
fact, it was rather more likely that he would not read it, because
no one would be able to read it. On a piece of paper measuring
seven by ten centimeters—in other words, three by four inches—
a little larger than the paper given you each morning at the
toilet, with a pen broken in the middle or bent into a hook, and
an inkwell with pieces of rag in it and ink diluted with water, you
would just be able to scratch out “Petit . . .” Then the letters
would all run together on the cheap paper, “ion” couldn’t be
worked into the line, and everything would come through on the
other side of the sheet.

You might have still other rights, but the duty officer would
keep quiet about them. And you wouldn’t be losing much, truth
to tell, even if you didn’t find out about them.

The check-up came and went. And the day began. The inter-
rogators were already arriving there somewhere. The turnkey
would summon one of us with a great air of secrecy; he called out
the first letter of the name only. Like this: “Whose name begins
with ‘S’?” and: “Whose name begins with ‘F’?” Or perhaps:
“Whose begins with ‘M”?—with ‘Am’?” And you yourself had to
be quick-witted enough to recognize that it was you he wanted
and offer yourself as a victim. This system was introduced to
prevent mistakes on the jailer’s part. He might have called out a
name in the wrong cell, and that way we might have found out
who else was in prison. And yet, though cut off from the entire
prison, we were not deprived of news from other cells. Because
they tried to crowd in as many prisoners as possible, they shuffled

210 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

them about from cell to cell, and every newcomer brought all his
accumulated experience to his new cell. Thus it was that we,
imprisoned on the fourth floor, knew all about the cellar cells,
about the boxes on the first floor, about the darkness on the second
floor, where the women were all kept, about the split-level arrange-
ment of the fifth, and about the biggest cell of all on the fifth
floor—No. 111. Before my time, the children’s writer Bondarin
had been a prisoner in our cell, and before that he had been on
the women’s floor with some Polish correspondent or other, who
had previously been a cellmate of Field Marshal von Paulus—and
that was how we learned all the details about von Paulus.

The period for being summoned to interrogation passed. And
for those left in the cell a long, pleasant day stretched ahead,
lightened by opportunities and not overly darkened by duties.
Duties could include sterilizing the cots with a blow torch twice
a month. (At the Lubyanka, matches were categorically for-
bidden to prisoners; to get a light for a cigarette we had to signal
patiently with a finger when the peephole was opened, thus asking
the jailer for a light. But blow torches were entrusted to us with-
out hesitation.) And once a week we might be called into the
corridor to have our faces clipped with a dull clipper—allegedly
a right but strongly resembling a duty. And one might be as-
signed the duty of cleaning the parquet floor in the cell. (Z——v
always avoided this work because it was beneath his dignity, like
any other work, in fact.) We got out of breath quickly because
we were underfed; otherwise we would have considered this duty
a privilege. It was such gay, lively work—pushing the brush
forward with one’s bare foot, torso pulled back, and then turn
about; forward-back, forward-back, and forget all your grief!
Shiny as a mirror! A Potemkin prison!

Besides, we didn’t have to go on being overcrowded in our
old Cell 67 any longer. In the middle of March they added a sixth
prisoner to our number, and since here in the Lubyanka they did
not fill all the cells with board bunks, nor make you sleep on the
floor, they transferred all of us into a beauty of a cell—No. 53.
(I would advise anyone who has not yet been in it to pay it a
visit.) This was not a cell. It was a palace chamber set aside as a
sleeping apartment for distinguished travelers! The Rossiya In-
surance Company, without a thought for economy, had raised the

First Cell, First Love | 211

height of the ceiling in this wing to sixteen and a half feet.** (Oh,
what four-story bunks the chief of counterintelligence at the
front would have slapped in here. And he could have gotten one
hundred people in, results guaranfeed.) And the window! It
was such an enormous window that standing on its sill the jailer
could hardly reach the “fortochka,” that hinged ventilation pane.
One section of this window alone would have made a fine whole
window in an ordinary house. Only the riveted steel sheets of the
muzzle closing off four-fifths of it reminded us that we were not
in a palace after all.

Nonetheless, on clear days, above this muzzle, from the wall
of the Lubyanka courtyard, from some windowpane or other on
the sixth or seventh floor, we now and then got a pale reflection
of a ray of sunlight. To us it was a real ray of sunlight—a living,
dear being! We followed with affection its climb up the wall.
And every step it made was filled with meaning, presaging the
time of our daily outing in the fresh air, counting off several half-
hours before lunch. Then, just before lunch, it disappeared.

And our rights included being let out for a walk, reading books,
telling one another about the past, listening and learning, arguing
and being educated! And we would be rewarded by a lunch that
included two courses! Too good to be true!

The walk was bad on the first three floors of the Lubyanka.
The prisoners were let out into a damp, low-lying little courtyard
—the bottom of a narrow well between the prison buildings. But
the prisoners on the fourth and fifth floors, on the other hand,
were taken to an eagle’s perch—on the roof of the fifth floor. It
had a concrete floor; there were concrete walls three times the
height of a man; we were accompanied by an unarmed jailer; on
the watch tower was a sentinel with an automatic weapon. But
the air was real and the sky was real! “Hands behind your back!
Line up in pairs! No talking! No stopping!” Such were the com-
mands, but they forgot to forbid us to throw back our heads.
And, of course, we did just that. Here one could see not a re-

18. This company acquired a piece of Moscow earth that was well ac-
quainted with blood. The innocent Vereshchagin was torn to pieces in 1812
on Furkasovsky, near the Rostopchin house. And the murderess and serf-owner
Saltychikha lived—and killed serfs—on the other side of the Bolshaya Lub-
yanka. (Po Moskve [In Moscow], edited by N. A. Geinike and others, Moscow,
Sabashnikov Publishers, 1917, p. 231.)

212 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

flected, not a secondhand Sun, but the real one! The real, eternally
living Sun itself! Or its golden diffusion through the spring clouds.

Spring promises everyone happiness—and tenfold to the pris-
oner. Oh, April sky! It didn’t matter that I was in prison. Evi-
dently, they were not going to shoot me. And in the end I would
become wiser here. I would come to understand many things
here, Heaven! I would correct my mistakes yet, O Heaven, not
for them but for you, Heaven! I had come to understand those
mistakes here, and I would correct them!

As if from a pit, from the far-off lower reaches, from Dzer-
zhinsky Square, the hoarse earthly singing of the automobile
horns rose to us in a constant refrain. To those who were dashing
along to the tune of those honkings, they seemed the trumpets
of creation, but from here their insignificance was very clear.

The walk in the fresh air lasted only twenty minutes, but how
much there was about it to concern oneself with; how much one
had to accomplish while it lasted.

In the first place, it was very interesting to try to figure out
the layout of the entire prison while they were taking you there
and back, and to calculate where those tiny hanging courtyards
were, so that at some later date, out in freedom, one could walk
along the square and spot their location. We made many turns
on the way there, and I invented the following system: Starting
from the cell itself, I would count every turn to the right as plus
one, and every turn to the left as minus one. And, no matter how
quickly they made us turn, the idea was not to try to picture it
hastily to oneself, but to count up the total. If, in addition,
through some staircase window, you could catch a glimpse of the
backs of the Lubyanka water nymphs, half-reclining against the
pillared turret which hovered over the square itself, and you could
remember the exact point in your count when this happened, then
back in the cell you could orient yourself and figure out what
your own window looked out on.

And during that outdoor walk you concentrated on breathing
as much fresh air as possible.

There, too, alone beneath that bright heaven, you had to im-
agine your bright future life, sinless and without error.

There, too, was the best place of all to talk about the most
dangerous subjects. It didn’t matter that conversation during the

First Cell, First Love | 213

walk was forbidden. One simply had to know how to manage it.
The compensation was that in all likelihood you could not be over-
heard either by a stoolie or by a microphone.

During these walks I tried to get into a pair with Susi. We
talked together in the cell, but we liked to try talking about the
main things here. We hadn’t come together quickly. It took some
time. But he had already managed to tell me a great deal. I
acquired a new capability from him: to accept patiently and pur-
posefully things that had never had any place in my own plans
and had, it seemed, no connection at all with the clearly outlined
direction of my life. From childhood on, I had somehow known
that my objective was the history of the Russian Revolution and
that nothing else concerned me. To understand the Revolution I
had long since required nothing beyond Marxism. I cut myself
off from everything else that came up and turned my back on it.
And now fate brought me together with Susi. He breathed a com-
pletely different sort of air. And he would tell me passionately
about his own interests, and these were Estonia and democracy.
And although I had never expected to become interested in
Estonia, much less bourgeois democracy, I nevertheless kept
listening and listening to his loving stories of twenty free years
in that modest, work-loving, small nation of big men whose ways
were slow and set. I listened to the principles of the Estonian con-
stitution, which had been borrowed from the best of European
experience, and to how their hundred-member, one-house parlia-
ment had worked. And, though the why of it wasn’t clear, I began
to like it all and store it all away in my experience.” I listened
willingly to their fatal history: the tiny Estonian anvil had, from
way, way back, been caught between two hammers, the Teutons
and the Slavs. Blows showered on it from East and West in turn;
there was no end to it, and there still isn’t. And there was the well-
known (totally unknown) story of how we Russians wanted to
take them over in one fell swoop in 1918, but they refused to
yield. And how, later on, Yudenich spoke contemptuously of their
Finnish heritage, and we ourselves christened them “White Guard
Bandits.” Then the Estonian gymnasium students enrolled as
volunteers. We struck at Estonia again in 1940, and again in

19. Susi remembered me later as a strange mixture of Marxist and democrat.
Yes, things were wildly mixed up inside me at that time.

214 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

1941, and again in 1944. Some of their sons were conscripted by
the Russian Army, and others by the German Army, and still
others ran off into the woods. The elderly Tallinn intellectuals
discussed how they might break out of that iron ring, break away
somehow, and live for themselves and by themselves. Their
Premier might, possibly, have been Tief, and their Minister of
Education, say, Susi. But neither Churchill nor Roosevelt cared
about them-in the least; but “Uncle Joe” did. And during the
very first nights after the Soviet armies entered Tallinn, all these
dreamers were seized in their Tallinn apartments. Fifteen of them
were imprisoned in various cells of the Moscow Lubyanka, one in
each, and were charged under Article 58-2 with the criminal
desire for national self-determination.

Each time we returned to the cell from our walk was like
being arrested again. Even in our very special cell the air seemed
stifling after the outdoors. And it would have been good to have
a snack afterward too. But it was best not to think about it—
not at all. It was bad if one of the prisoners who received food
parcels tactlessly spread out his treasures at the wrong time and
began to eat. All right, we'll develop self-control! It was bad,
too, to be betrayed by the author of the book you were reading—
if he began to drool over food in the greatest detail. Get away
from me, Gogol! Get away from me, Chekhov, too! They both _
had too much food in their books. “He didn’t really feel like
eating, but nevertheless he ate a helping of veal and drank some
beer.” The son-of-a-bitch! It was better to read spiritual things!
Dostoyevsky was the right kind of author for prisoners to read!
Yet even in Dostoyevsky you could find that passage “The chil-
dren went hungry. For several days they had seen nothing but
bread and sausage.”

The Lubyanka library was the prison’s principal ornament.
True, the librarian was repulsive—a blond spinster with a horsy
build, who did everything possible to make herself ugly. Her
face was so whitened that it looked like a doll’s immobile mask;
her lips were purple; and her plucked eyebrows were black. (You
might say that was her own business, but we would have enjoyed
it more if she had been a charmer. However, perhaps the chief
of the Lubyanka had already taken that into consideration?)
But here was a wonder: once every ten days, when she came to

First Cell, First Love’ | 215

take away our books, she listened to our requests for new ones!
She heard us out in that same machinelike, inhuman Lubyanka
manner, and it was impossible to judge whether she had heard
the authors’ names or the titles, whether, indeed, she had heard
our words at all. She would leave, and we would experience
several hours of nervous but happy expectation. During those
hours all the books we had returned were leafed through and
checked. They were examined in case we had left pinpricks or
dots underneath certain letters—for there was such a ‘method
of clandestine intramural communication—or we had underlined
passages we liked with a fingernail. We were worried even though
we were totally innocent. They might come to us and say that
they had discovered pinpricks. They were always right, of course;
and, as always, no proof was required. And on that basis we could
be deprived of books for three months—if, indeed, they didn’t put
the whole cell on a punishment-cell regime. It would be very
sad to have to do without books during the best and brightest of
our prison months, before we were tossed into the pit of camp.
Indeed, we were not only afraid; we actually trembled, just. as
we had in youth after sending a love letter, while we waited for
an answer. Will it come or not? And what will it say?

Then at last the books arrived and determined the pattern of
the next ten days. They would decide whether we would chiefly
= concentrate on reading or, if they had brought us trash, be spénd-
ing more time in conversation. They brought exactly as many
books as there were people in the cell, this being the sort of .
calculation appropriate to a bread cutter and not a librarian: one
book for one person, six books for six persons. The cells with the
largest number of prisoners were the best off. .

Sometimes the spinster would fill our orders mnizartiiously, But
even when she was careless about them, things could turn out
interestingly. Because the library of the Big Lubyanka was unique.
In all probability it had been assembled out of confiscated private
libraries. The bibliophiles who had collected those books had al-
ready rendered up their souls to God. But the main thing was that
while State Security had been busy censoring and emasculating
all the libraries of the nation for decades, it forgot to dig in its
own bosom. Here, in its very den, one could read Zamyatin, Pil-
nyak, Panteleimon Romanov, and any volume at all of the com-

216 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

plete works of Merezhkovsky. (Some people wisecracked that
they allowed us to read forbidden books because they already re-
garded us as dead. But I myself think that the Lubyanka librarians
hadn’t the faintest concept of what they were giving us—they
were simply lazy and ignorant.)

We used to read intensively during the hours before lunch. But
it sometimes happened that a single phrase would get you going
and drive you to pace from window to door, from door to window.
And you would want to show somebody what you had read and
explain what it implied, and then an argument would get started.
It was a time for sharp arguments, as well!

I often argued with Yuri Y.

On that March morning when they led the five of us into palatial
Cell 53, they had just added a sixth prisoner to our group.

He entered, it seemed, like a spirit, and his shoes made no
noise against the floor. He entered and, not sure that he could
stay on his feet, leaned against the door frame. The bulb had
been turned off in the cell and the morning light was dim. How-
ever, the newcomer did not have his eyes wide open. He squinted,
and he kept silent.

The cloth of his military field jacket and trousers did not
identify him as coming from the Soviet, or the German, or the
Polish, or the English Army. The structure of his face was elong-
ated. There was very little Russian in it. And he was painfully
thin. And not only very thin but very tall.

We spoke to him in Russian—and he kept silent. Susi addressed
him in German—he still kept silent. Fastenko tried French and
English—with the same result. Only gradually did a smile appear
on his emaciated, yellow, half-dead face—the only such smile I
had ever seen in my life.

“Pee—eeple,” he uttered weakly, as if he were coming out of a
faint, or as if he had been waiting all night long to be executed.
And he reached out his weak, emaciated hand. It held a small
bundle tied up in a rag. Our stoolie understood instantly what was
in it, threw himself on it, grabbed it, and opened it up on the table.
There was half a pound of light tobacco. He had instantly man-

First Cell, First Love | 217

aged to roll himself a cigarette four times the size of an ordi-
nary one.

Thus, after three weeks’ confinement in a cellar box, Yuri
Nikolayevich Y. made his appearance in our cell.

From the time of the 1929 incidents on the Chinese Eastern
Railroad, the song had been sung throughout the land:

Its steel breast brushing aside our enemies,
The 27th stands on guard!

The chief of artillery of this 27th Infantry Division, formed
back in the Civil War, was the Tsarist officer Nikolai Y. (I re-
membered the name because it was the name of one of the
authors of our artillery textbook.) In a heated freight car that
had been converted into living quarters, and always accompanied
by his wife, this artillery officer had crossed and recrossed the
Volga and the Urals, sometimes moving east and sometimes west.
It was in this heated freight car that his son, Yuri, born in 1917,
and twin brother, therefore, of the Revolution itself, spent his
first years.

That was a long time ago. Since then his father had settled in
Leningrad, in the Academy, and lived well and frequented high
circles, and the son graduated from the officer candidate school.
During the Finnish War, Yuri wanted desperately to fight for
the Motherland, and friends of his father got him an appointment
as an aide on an army staff. Yuri did not have to crawl on his
stomach to destroy the Finns’ concrete artillery emplacements, nor
get trapped and encircled on a scouting mission, nor freeze in
the snow under sniper bullets—but his service was nevertheless
rewarded, not with some ordinary decoration, but with the Order
of the Red Banner, which fitted neatly on his field shirt. Thus he
completed the Finnish War in full consciousness of its justice and
his own part in it.

But he didn’t have things so easy in the next war. The battery
he commanded was surrounded near Luga. They scattered and
were caught and driven off into prisoner-of-war camps. Yuri
found himself in a concentration camp for officers near Vilnius.

In every life there is one particular event that is decisive for
the entire person—for his fate, his convictions, his passions. Two
years in that camp shook Yuri up once and for all. It is impossible

218 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

to catch with words or to circumvent with syllogisms what that
camp was. That was a camp to die in—and whoever did not die
was compelled to reach certain conclusions.

Among those who could survive were the Ordners—the in-
ternal camp police or Polizei—chosen from among the prisoners.
Of course, Yuri did not become an Ordner. The cooks managed
to survive too. The translators could survive also—they needed
them. But though Yuri had a superb command of conversational
German, he concealed this fact. He realized that a translator
would have to betray his fellow prisoners. One could also post-
pone dying by digging graves, but others stronger and more
dexterous got those jobs. Yuri announced that he was an artist.
And, actually, as part of his varied education at home, he had
been given lessons in painting. Yuri didn’t paint badly in oils,
and only his desire to follow in his father’s footsteps—tfor he. had
been proud of his father—had kept him from entering art school.

Together with an elderly artist (I regret that I don’t remember
his name) he occupied a separate room in the barracks. And
there Yuri painted for nothing schmaltzy pictures such as Nero’s
Feast and the Chorus of Elves and the like for the German
officers on the commandant’s staff. In return, he was given food.
The slops for which the POW officers stood in line with their
mess tins from 6 A.M. on, while the Ordners beat them with
sticks and the cooks with ladles, were not enough to sustain life.
At evening, Yuri could see from the windows of their room the
one and only picture for which his artistic talent had been given
him: the evening mist hovering above a swampy meadow en-
circled by barbed wire; a multitude of bonfires; and, around the
bonfires, beings who had once been Russian officers but had now
become beastlike creatures who gnawed the bones of dead horses,
who baked patties from potato rinds, who smoked manure and
were all swarming with lice. Not all those two-legged creatures
had died as yet. Not all of them had yet lost the capacity for in-
telligible speech, and one-could see in the crimson reflections of
the bonfires how a belated understanding was dawning on those
faces which were descending to the Neanderthal.

`- Wormwood on the tongue! That life which Yuri had preserved
was no longer precious to him for its own sake. He was not one
of those who easily agree to forget. No, if he was going to survive,
he was obliged to draw certain conclusions. .

First Cell, First Love | 219

It was already clear to them that the Germans were not the
heart of the matter, or at least not the Germans alone; that among
the POW’s of many nationalities only the Soviets lived like this
and died like this. None were worse off than the Soviets. Even the
Poles, even the Yugoslavs, existed in far more tolerable condi-
tions; and as for the English and the Norwegians, they were in-
undated by the International Red Cross with parcels from home.
They didn’t even bother to line up for the German rations. Wher-
ever there were Allied POW camps next door, their prisoners,
out of kindness, threw our men handouts over the fence, and
our prisoners jumped on these gifts like a pack of dogs on a
bone.

The Russians were carrying the whole war on their shoulders
—and this was the Russian lot. Why?

Gradually, explanations came in from here and there: it turned
out that the U.S.S.R. did not recognize as binding Russia’s signa-
ture to the Hague Convention on war prisoners. That meant that
the U.S.S.R. accepted no obligations at all in the treatment of war
prisoners and took no steps for the protection of its own soldiers
who had been captured.” The U.S.S.R. did not recognize the In-
ternational Red Cross. The U.S.S.R. did not recognize its own
soldiers of the day before: it did not intend to give them any
help as POW’s.

And the heart of Yuri, enthusiastic twin of the October Revo-
lution, grew cold. In their barracks room, he and the elderly artist
clashed and argued. It was difficult for Yuri to accept. Yuri re-
sisted. But the old man kept peeling off layer after layer. What
was it all about? Stalin? But wasn’t it too much to ascribe every-
thing to Stalin, to those stubby hands? He who draws a con-
clusion only halfway fails to draw it at all. What about the rest
of them? The ones right next to Stalin and below him, and every-
where around the country—all those whom the Motherland had
authorized to speak for it?

What is the right course of action if our mother has sold us to

20. We did not recognize that 1907 Convention until 1955. Incidentally, in
his diary for 1915, Melgunov reports rumors that Russia would not let aid go
through for its prisoners in Germany and that ‘their living conditions were
worse than those of all other Allied prisoners—simply in order to prevent
rumors about the good life of war prisoners inducing our soldiers to surrender
willingly. There was some sort of continuity of ideas here. (Melgunov, Vos-
pominaniya i Dnevniki, Vol. I, pp. 199 and 203.)

220 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

the gypsies? No, even worse, thrown us to the dogs? Does she
really remain our mother? If a wife has become a whore, are we
really still bound to her in fidelity? A Motherland that betrays its
soldiers—is that really a Motherland?

And everything turned topsy-turvy for Yuri! He used to take
pride in his father—now he cursed him! For the first time he
began to consider that his father had, in essence, betrayed his oath
to that army in which he had been brought up—had betrayed it
in order to help establish this system which now betrayed its own
soldiers. Why, then, was Yuri bound by his own oath to that
traitorous system?

When, in the spring of 1943, recruiters from the first Byelorus-
sian “legions” put in an appearance, some POW’s signed up with
them to escape starvation. Yuri went with them out of conviction,
with a clear mind. But he didn’t stay in the legion for long. As
the saying goes: “Once they’ve skinned you, there’s no point in
grieving over the wool.” By this time Yuri had given up hiding
his excellent knowledge of German, and soon a certain Chief, a
German from near Kassel, who had been assigned to create an
espionage school with an accelerated wartime output, took Yuri
as his right-hand man. And that was how Yuri began the down-
ward slide he had not foreseen. That was how things got turned
around. Yuri passionately desired to free his Motherland, and
what did they do but shove him into training spies? The Germans
had their own plans. Just where could one draw the line? Which
step was the fatal one? Yuri became a lieutenant in the German
Army. He traveled through Germany, in German uniform, spent
some time in Berlin, visited Russian émigrés, and read authors
like Bunin, Nabokov, Aldanov, Amfiteatrov, whose works were
forbidden at home. Yuri had anticipated that in all their writing,
in Bunin’s, for example, the blood flowing from Russia’s living
wounds would pour from every page. What was wrong with
them? To what did they devote their unutterably precious free-
dom? To the female body, to ecstasy, sunsets, the beauty of noble
brows, to anecdotes going back to dusty years. They wrote as if
there had been no revolution in Russia, or as if it were too com-
plex for them to explain. They left it to young Russian people to
find for themselves what was highest in life. And Yuri dashed
back and forth, in a hurry to see, in a hurry to know, and mean-

First Cell, First Love | 221

while, in accordance with ancient Russian tradition, he kept
drowning his confusion more and more often and more and more
deeply in vodka.

What was their spy school really? It was, of course, not a real
one. All they could be taught in six months was to master the
parachute, the use of explosives, and the use of portable radios.
The Germans put no special trust in them. In sending them
across the lines they were simply whistling in the dark. And for
those dying, hopelessly abandoned Russian POW’s, those schools,
in Yuri’s opinion, were a good way out. The men ate their fill,
got new warm clothing, and, in addition, had their pockets
stuffed with Soviet money. The students (and their teachers)
acted as if all this nonsense were genuine—as if they would
actually carry out spying missions in the Soviet rear, blow up the
designated objectives, get back in touch with the Germans via
radio, and return to the German lines. But in reality in their
eyes this school was simply a means of sidestepping death and
captivity. They wanted to live, but not at the price of shooting
their own compatriots at the front.2* The Germans sent them
across the front lines, and from then on their free choice depended
on their own morality and conscience. They all threw away their
TNT and radio apparatus immediately. The only point on which
they differed was whether to surrender to the authorities immedi-
ately, like the snub-nosed “shhpy” I had encountered at army
counterintelligence headquarters, or whether to get drunk first
and have some fun squandering all that free money. None of them
ever recrossed the front lines to the Germans.

Suddenly, as the new year of 1945 approached, one smart
fellow did return and reported he had carried out his assignment.
(Just go and check on it!) He created a sensation. The Chief
hadn’t the slightest doubt that SMERSH had sent him back and
decided to shoot him. (The fate of a conscientious spy!) But Yuri
insisted that he be given a decoration instead and held up as an

21. Of course, our Soviet interrogators did not accept this line of reasoning.
What right did they have to want to live—at a time when privileged families
in the Soviet rear lived well without collaborating? No one ever thought of
considering that these boys had refused to take up German arms against their
own people. For playing spies, they were nailed with the very worst and most
serious charges of all—Article 58-6, plus sabotage with intent. This meant: to
be held until dead.

222 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

example to the others taking the course. The returned “spy”
invited Yuri to drink a quart of vodka with him and, crimson
from drink, leaned across the table and disclosed: “Yuri Nikola-
yevich! The Soviet Command promises you forgiveness if you will
come over to us immediately.”

Yuri trembled. And that heart which had already grown hard,
which had renounced everything, was flooded with warmth. The
Motherland? Accursed, unjust, but nonetheless still precious!
Forgiveness? And he could go back to his own family? And
walk along Kamennoostrovsky in Leningrad? All right, so what?
We are Russian! If you will forgive us, we will return, and we
will behave ourselves, oh, how well! That year and a half since
he had left the POW camp had not brought Yuri happiness. He
did not repent, but he could see no future either. And when,
‘while drinking, he encountered other such unrepentant Russians,
he learned that they realized clearly that they had nothing to
stand on. It wasn’t real life. The Germans were twisting them to
.suit themselves. But now, when the Germans were obviously
‘ losing the war, Yuri had been offered an out. His Chief, who
liked him, confided that he had a second estate in Spain which
they could head for together if the German Reich went up in
smoke. But there across the table sat his drunken compatriot,
coaxing him at the risk of his own life: “Yuri Nikolayevich! The
Soviet Command values your experience and knowledge. They
want you to tell them about the organization of the German in-
telligence service.” |

For two weeks Yuri was torn by hesitation. But during the
Soviet offensive beyond the Vistula, after he had led his school
well out of the way, he ordered them to turn in to a quiet Polish
farm, lined them all up, and declared: “I am going over to the
Soviet side! There is a free choice for everyone!” And these
sad-sack spies, with the milk hardly dry on their lips, who just
one hour before had pretended loyalty to the German Reich, now
cried out with enthusiasm: “Hurrah! Us too!” (They were shout-
ing “hurrah” for their future lives at hard labor.)

Then the entire spy school hid until the arrival of the Soviet
tanks; and then came SMERSH. Yuri saw his boys no more.
They took him off by himself and gave him ten days to describe
the whole history of the school, the programs, the sabotage
assignments. He really thought that they valued his “experience

First Cell, First Love | 223

and knowledge.” They were already talking about his going
home to his family.

Only when he arrived at the Lubyanka did he realize that even
in Salamanca he would have been closer to his native Neva. He
could now await being shot, or, in any case, a sentence of cer-
tainly not less than twenty years.

So immutably does a human being surrender to the mist of the
Motherland! Just as a tooth will not stop aching until the nerve
is killed, so is it with us; we shall probably not stop responding
to the call of the Motherland until we swallow arsenic. The lotus-
eaters in the Odyssey knew of a certain lotus for that purpose. ...

In all, Yuri spent three weeks in our cell. I argued with him
during all those weeks. I said that our Revolution was magnificent
and just; that only its 1929 distortion was terrible. He looked at
me regretfully, compressing his nervous lips: before trying our
hands at revolution, we should have exterminated the bedbugs
in this country! (Sometimes, oddly, he and Fastenko arrived at
the same conclusions, approaching them from such different be-
ginnings.) I said there had been a long period in which the
people in charge of everything important in our country had been
people of unimpeachably lofty intentions, and totally dedicated.
He said that from the very beginning they were all cut from the
same cloth as Stalin. (We agreed that Stalin was a gangster.)
I praised Gorky to the skies. What a smart man he had been!
How correct his point of view! What a great artist he was! And
Yuri parried. He was an insignificant, terribly boring personality!
He invented himself; he invented his heroes; and his books were
fabrications from beginning to end. Lev Tolstoi—he was the king
of our literature.

As a result of these daily arguments, vehement because of our
youth, he and I were never able to become really close or to
discern and accept in each other more than we rejected.

They took him out of our cell; and since then, no matter how
often I have inquired, I have found no one who was imprisoned
with him in the Butyrki, and no one who encountered him in a
transit prison. Even the rank-and-file Vlasov men have all dis-
appeared without a trace, under the earth, most likely, and even
now some of them do not have the documents they need in order
to leave the northern wastes. But even among them, the fate of
Yuri Y. was not a rank-and-file fate.

224 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

At long last our Lubyanka lunch arrived. Long before it got
to us we could hear the cheery clatter in the corridor, and then,
as in a restaurant, they brought in a tray with two aluminum
plates—not bowls—for each prisoner. One plate held a ladleful
of soup and the other a ladleful of the thinnest kind of thin gruel,
with no fat in it.

In his first excitement, a prisoner couldn’t get anything down
his throat. There were those who didn’t touch their bread for
several days, who didn’t know where to put it. But gradually
one’s appetite returned; and then a chronically famished state
ensued that became almost uncontrollable. Then, if one managed
to get it under control, one’s stomach shrank and adapted itself
to inadequate food, at which point the meager Lubyanka fare
became just right. One needed to have self-control to achieve
this, and also needed to stop looking around to see who might
be eating something extra. All those extremely dangerous prison
conversations about food had to be outlawed, and one had to
try to lift oneself, as far as possible, into higher spheres. At the
Lubyanka this was made easier by our being permitted two hours
of rest after lunch—something else that was astonishingly resort-
like. We lay down, our backs to the peephole, set up open books
for appearance’ sake, and dozed off. Sleep was forbidden, strictly
speaking, and the guards could see that the pages of the books
hadn’t been turned for a long time. But ordinarily they did not
knock during this period. (The explanation for this humanitarian-
ism was that whoever wasn’t resting during these hours was under-
going interrogation. Thus, for those who were stubborn, who
had not signed the depositions, the contrast was unmistakable:
they returned to the cell at the very end of the rest period.)

And sleep was the very best thing for hunger and anguish.
One’s organism cooled off, and the brain stopped recapitulating
one’s mistakes over and over again.

Then they brought in dinner—another ladle of gruel. Life was
setting all its gifts before you. After that, you were not going to
get anything to eat in the five or six hours before bedtime, but
that was not so terrible; it was easy to get used to not eating in

First Cell, First Love | 225

the evenings. That has long been known in military medicine.
And in reserve regiments they don’t have anything to eat in the
evening.

Then came the time for the evening visit to the toilet, for which,
in all likelihood, you had waited, all atremble, all day. How
relieved, how eased, the whole world suddenly became! How the
great questions all simplified themselves at the same instant—
did you feel it?

Oh, the weightless Lubyanka evenings! (Only weightless, in-
cidentally, if you were not awaiting a night interrogation.) A
weightless body, just sufficiently satisfied by soup so that the
soul did not feel oppressed by it. What light, free thoughts! It
was as if we had been lifted up to the heights of Sinai, and there
the truth manifested itself to us from out the fire. Was it not of
this that Pushkin dreamed:

I want to live to think and suffer!

And there we suffered, and we thought, and there was nothing
else in our lives. How easy it turned out to be to attain that ideal.

Some evenings I would get involved in arguments, withdraw-
ing from a chess game with Susi or from a book. Again I would
have the sharpest quarrels with Yuri, because the questions were
all explosive ones—for example, the question of the outcome of
the war. The jailer, without any word or change of expression,
would come in and pull down the dark-blue blackout blind on
the window. And then, out there on the other side of the blind,
evening Moscow would begin to send up salutes. And just as we
could not see the salutes lighting up the heavens, we were unable
to see the map of Europe. Yet we tried to picture it in all its
details and to guess which cities had been taken. Yuri was espe-
cially tormented by those salutes. Appealing to fate to correct his
own mistakes, he assured us that the war was by no means fin-
ished and that the Red Army and the Anglo-American forces
would now go for each other’s throats: that the real war would
really begin now. The others in the cell took a greedy interest
in this prediction. How would such a conflict end? Yuri claimed
it would end with the easy destruction of the Red Army. (Would
this result in our liberation or our execution?) I objected to this,
and we got into heated arguments. It was his contention that our

226 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

army was worn down, bled white, poorly supplied, and, most
importantly, that it would not fight with its usual determination
against the Allies. I, however, insisted, on the basis of the units
I had been familiar with, that the army was not so much worn
down as experienced, that it had now become both strong and
mean, and that in such an event it would crush the Allies even
~ more thoroughly than. it had the Germans. “Never,” cried Yuri
in a half-whisper. “And what about the Ardennes?” I answered
in a half-whisper. Fastenko interrupted us, ridiculing us both,
informing us that we did not understand the West and that no
“one, now or ever, could compel the Allied armies to fight against
us.

However,-in the evening we didn’t want to argue so much as
to hear something interesting that might bring us ee together,
and to talk in a spirit of fellowship.

One favorite subject of conversation was prison traditions,
how it used to be in prison. We had Fastenko and were therefore
able to hear these stories at first hand. What dismayed us most of
all was to learn that it had previously been an honor to be a
political prisoner, and that it was not only their relatives who
stuck by them and refused to renounce them, but that girls who
had never even met them came to visit them, pretending for that
purpose to be their fiancées. And what about the once universal
tradition of gifts for the prisoners on holidays? No one in Russia
ever broke the Lenten fast without first taking gifts for unknown
prisoners to the common prison kitchen. They brought in Christ-
mas hams, tarts, and kulichi—the special Russian Easter cakes.
One poor old lady even used to bring a dozen colored Easter
eggs; it made her feel better. And where had all that Russian
generosity gone? It had been replaced by political consciousness.
That was how cruelly and implacably they had terrified our
people and cured them of taking thought for and caring for
those who were suffering. Today it would seem silly to do such
a thing. If it was proposed today that some institution organize
a preholiday collection of gifts for prisoners in the local prison,
it would be virtually considered an anti-Soviet revolt! That’s how —
_ far we have gone along the road to being brutalized!

And what about those holiday gifts? Were they only a matter
of tasty food? More importantly, those gifts gave the prisoners

First Cell, First Love | 227

the warm feeling that people in freedom were thinking about
them and were concerned for them.

Fastenko told us that even in the Soviet period a Political Red
Cross had existed. We found this difficult to imagine. It wasn’t
that we thought he was telling us an untruth. Somehow we just
couldn’t picture such a thing. He told us that Y. P. Peshkova,
taking advantage of her personal immunity, had traveled abroad,
collected money there (you’d not collect much here), and then
seen to it that foodstuffs were bought in Russia for political pris-
oners who had no relatives. For all political prisoners? And he
explained at this point that the KR’s—the so-called “Counter-
Revolutionaries”’—engineers and priests, for example, weren’t
included, but only members of former political parties. Well,
why didn’t you say so right away? Yes, and then for the most part
the Political Red Cross, except Peshkova, was itself liquidated
and its staff imprisoned.

It was also very pleasant, on those evenings when one wasn’t
expecting interrogation, to talk about getting out of prison. Yes,
they said there had been astonishing instances when they did
release someone. One day they took Z v from our cell, “with
his things’—perhaps to free him? But his interrogation could
not have been completed so swiftly. Ten days later he returned.
They had dragged him off to Lefortovo. When he got there, he
had evidently begun to sign things very quickly. So they brought
him back to us. “Now if they should just release you,” we would
say to a fellow prisoner, “since your case, after all, isn’t very
serious, as you yourself say, then you must promise to go see my
wife and, to show you've done it, tell her, let’s say, to put two
apples in my next parcel. . . . But there aren’t any apples
anywhere right now, so tell her to put in three bagels. But then
there: mightn’t be any bagels in Moscow either. So all right, it
will just have to be four potatoes!” (That’s how the discussion
went, and then they actually did take N. off, “with his things,”
and M. got four potatoes in his next parcel. Truly astonishing!
It was more than a coincidence! So they had really let him go!
And his case was much more serious than mine. So maybe soon

. However, what really happened was that M.’s wife brought
five potatoes, but one of them got crushed in her bag, and N. was
in the hold of a ship en route to the Kolyma.)

228 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

And so it went. We talked about all kinds of things and recalled
something amusing, and it was all very jolly and delightful to be
among interesting people who were so different from those you
used to spend your life with, and who came from outside your
own circle of experience. Meanwhile the silent evening check-up
had come and gone, and they had taken eyeglasses away and the
light bulb had blinked three times. That meant that bedtime would
be in five minutes.

Quick! Quick! Grab a blanket! Just as you never knew at the
front when a hail of shells would begin to fall all around you,
here you didn’t know which would be your fateful interrogation
night. And we would lie down with one arm on top of the blanket
and try to expel the whirlwind of thought from our heads. Go
to sleep!

And at a certain moment on an April evening, soon after we
had seen Yuri off, the lock rattled. Hearts tightened. For whom
had they come? Now the jailer would whisper: “Name with ‘S’?
Name with ‘Z’?” But the guard did not whisper anything. The
door closed. We raised our heads. There was a newcomer at the
door: on the thin side, young, in a cheap blue suit and a dark-blue
cap. He had nothing with him. He looked around in a state of
confusion.

“What’s the cell number?” he asked in alarm.

“Fifty-three.”

He shuddered a bit.

“Are you from freedom?” we asked.

“No!” He shook his head in a painful sort of way.

“When were you arrested?”

“Yesterday morning.”

We roared. He had a very gentle, innocent sort of face, and
his eyebrows were nearly white.

“What for?”

(It was an unfair question. One could not really expect an
answer. )

“Oh, I don’t know. .. . Nothing much.”

That was how they all replied. Everyone here was imprisoned
because of nothing much. And to the newly arrested prisoner his
own case always seemed especially nothing much.

“But anyway, what was it?”

First Cell, First Love | 229

“Well, you see, I wrote a proclamation. To the Russian peo-
ple.”

“Whaaat?”

(None of us had ever run into that sort of “nothing much.” )

“Are they going to shoot me?” His face grew longer. He kept
pulling at the visor of the cap he had still not taken off.

“Well, no, probably not,” we reassured him. “They don’t shoot
anyone nowadays. They give out fenners—every time the clock
strikes.”

“Are you a worker? Or a white-collar employee?” asked the
Social Democrat, true to his class principles.

“A worker.”

Fastenko reached out a hand to him and triumphantly pro-
claimed to me: “You see, Aleksandr Isayevich, that’s the mood
of the working class!”

He turned away to go to sleep, assuming that there was no-
where else to go from there and nothing else to listen to.

But he was wrong.

“What do you mean, a proclamation? Just like that? Without
any reason? In whose name was it issued?”

“In my own.”

“And who are you?”

The newcomer smiled with embarrassment: “The Emperor,
Mikhail.”

An electric shock ran through us all. Once again we raised
ourselves on our cots and looked at him. No, his shy, thin face
was not in the least like the face of Mikhail Romanov. And then
his age too...

“Tomorrow, tomorrow. Time to sleep now,” said Susi sternly.

We went to sleep, confident that the two hours before the morn-
ing bread ration were not going to be boring.

They brought in a cot and bedding for the Emperor, and he
lay down quietly next to the latrine bucket.

=
In 1916 a portly stranger, an elderly man with a light-brown

beard, entered the home of the Moscow locomotive engineer
Belov and said to the engineer’s pious wife: “Pelageya! You have

230 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

a year-old son. Take good care of him for the Lord. The hour will
come—and I will come to you again.” Then he left.

Pelageya did not have the faintest idea who this man was. But
he had spoken so clearly and authoritatively that her mother’s
heart accepted his word as law. And she cared for her child like
the apple of her eye. Viktor grew up to be quiet, obedient, and
pious; and he often saw visions of the angels and the Holy Virgin.
But, as he grew up, these visions became less frequent. The elderly
man did not come again. Viktor learned to be a chauffeur, and
in 1936 he was taken into the army and sent off to Birobidzhan,
where he was stationed in an auto transport company. He was not
at all overly familiar or cheeky, and perhaps it was his quiet
demeanor and modesty, so untypical of a chauffeur, which at-
tracted a civilian girl employee. But the commander of his platoon
was after the same girl and found himself out in the cold because
of Viktor. At this time, Marshal Bliicher came to their area for
maneuvers and his personal chauffeur fell seriously ill. Bliicher
ordered the commander of the motor company to send him the
best driver in the company; the company commander summoned
the platoon commander, who immediately latched onto the idea
of dumping his rival, Belov. (That’s the way it often is in the
army. The person who deserves promotion doesn’t get it, and
the person they want to get rid of does.) In addition, Belov was
sober, a hard worker, and reliable—he wouldn’t let them
down.

Bliicher liked Belov. So Belov stayed with him. Soon Bliicher
was summoned to Moscow on a plausible pretext. This was how
they separated the marshal from his power base in the Far East
before arresting him. He had brought his own chauffeur, Belov,
to Moscow with him. Having lost his boss, Belov then landed in
the Kremlin garage and began chauffeuring, sometimes for Mi-
khailov (of the Komsomol), sometimes for Lozovsky or some-
body else in the leadership, and, finally, for Khrushchev. He had
a close view of things—and he told us a lot, too, about the feasts,
the morals, the security precautions. As a representative of the
rank-and-file Moscow proletariat, he was also present at the trial
of Bukharin in the House of the Unions. Of all those for whom
he worked, he spoke well only of Khrushchev. Only in Khru-
shchev’s home was the chauffeur seated at the family table instead
of being put in the kitchen. Only there, in those years, did he

First Cell, First Love | 231

find the simplicity of the workingman’s life preserved. Khru-
shchev, who enjoyed life hugely, also became attached to Viktor
Alekseyevich, and in 1938, when he left for the Ukraine, he tried
to get him to go along. “I would have stayed with Khrushchev
forever,” said Viktor Alekseyevich. But for some reason he felt
he should remain in Moscow. :
For a while in 1941, before the beginning of the war, he was
not employed in the government garage and, having no one to
protect him, he was taken into military service. But because his
health was poor, he was not’sent to the front but to a labor bat-
talion. First they went on foot to Inza, to dig trenches and build
roads there. After his secure and -prosperous life of the previous-
few years he. found it painful to have his nose shoved in the dirt.
He drank a full draft of grief and poverty there, and on every
side he saw not only that people had not begun to live better
before the war, but that they were deeply impoverished. Just
barely surviving himself, and released from the service because
of illness, he returned to Moscow and again managed to get him-
self a job as chauffeur for Shcherbakov,” and after that for
Sedin, People’s Commissar of Petroleum. But Sedin embezzled
funds to the tune of 35 million and was quietly removed. And
Belov was once again out of a job driving for the leaders. He
became a chauffeur at an automobile depot, and in his spare time
he used to moonlight with his car on the road to Krasnaya Pakhra.
But his thoughts were already centered elsewhere. In 1943
he had been visiting his mother. She was doing the laundry and
had gone out to the hydrant with her pails. The door opened and
a portly stranger, an old man with a white beard, entered the
house. He crossed himself at the ikon there, looked sternly at
Belov, and said to him: “Hail, Mikhail. God gives you his bless-
ing!” Belov replied: “My name is Viktor.” “But,” the old man
continued, “you are destined to become Mikhail, the Emperor
of Holy Russia!” Just then Viktor’s mother returned and half-
collapsed in fright, spilling her pails. It was the very same old |
man who had come to her twenty-seven years before. He had
turned white in the meantime, but it was he. “God bless you,
22. He used to describe how the obese Shcherbakov hated to see people
around when he arrived at his Informburo, so they temporarily removed all
those who were working in the offices he had to walk through. Grunting be-

cause of his fat, he would lean down and pull back a corner of the carpet. And
the whole Informburo caught it if he found any dust there.

232 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

Pelageya, you have preserved your son,” said the old man. And
he took the future Emperor aside, like a patriarch preparing to
enthrone him, and announced to the astonished young man that
in 1953 there would be a change in rule and that he would be-
come Emperor of All Russia.” (That is why the number of our
cell, 53, shocked him so.) To this end, the old man told him,
he was to begin to gather his forces in 1948. The old man didn’t
instruct him as to how to gather his forces. He departed, and
Viktor Alekseyevich didn’t get around to asking.

All the peace and simplicity of his life were lost to him now.
Perhaps some other individual would have recoiled from the
ambitious program, but Viktor, as it happened, had rubbed
shoulders with the highest of the high. He had seen all those
Mikhailovs, Shcherbakovs, Sedins, and he had heard a lot from
other chauffeurs, too, and he had gotten it clear in his own mind
that nothing in the least unusual was required—in fact, just the
reverse.

The newly anointed Tsar, quiet, conscientious, sensitive, like
Fyodor Ivanovich, the last of the line of Ryurik, felt on his brow
the heavy pressure of the crown of Monomakh. All around him
were the people’s poverty and grief, for which he had not until
now borne any responsibility. Now all this lay upon his shoulders,
and he was to blame for the fact that this misery still existed. It
seemed strange to him to wait until 1948, and, therefore, in that
very autumn of 1943, he wrote his first proclamation to the
Russian people and read it to four of his fellow workers in the
garage of the People’s Commissariat of Petroleum.

We had surrounded Viktor Alekseyevich from early morning,
and he had meekly told us all this. We had still not fathomed his
childish trustfulness—we were absorbed in his unusual story and
—it was our fault—we forgot to warn him about the stoolie. In
fact, we never even thought for one minute that there was any-
thing in the naive and simple story he had told us that the inter-
rogator didn’t already know.

The instant the story ended, Kramarenko began demanding
to be taken either to the “chief of the prison for tobacco” or else
to the doctor. At any rate, they summoned him quickly. And as
soon as he got there he put the finger on those four workers in

23. The prophetic old man made only one mistake. He confused the
chauffeur with his former employer.

First Cell, First Love | 233

the garage of the People’s Commissariat of Petroleum—whose
existence no one would ever have suspected. (The next day, re-
turning from his interrogation, Belov was astonished that the
interrogator knew about them. And that’s when it hit us.) Those
workers had heard the proclamation and approved it all, and
no one had turned in the Emperor! But he himself felt that it
was too early, and he burned it.

A year passed. Viktor Alekseyevich was working as a mechanic
in the garage of an automobile depot. In the fall of 1944, he
again wrote a proclamation and gave it to ten people to read—
chauffeurs and lathe operators. All of them approved it. And no
one turned him in. (It was a surprising thing, indeed, that not one
person in that group of ten had turned him in, in that period
of ubiquitous stool pigeons! Fastenko had not been mistaken in
his deductions about the “mood of the working class.”) True,
in this case the Emperor had used some innocent tricks. He had
thrown out hints that a strong arm inside the government was on
his side. And he had promised his supporters travel assignments
to rally monarchic sentiment at the grass roots.

Months went by. The Emperor entrusted his secret to two
girls at the garage. But this time there was no misfire. These
girls turned out to be ideologically sound! And Viktor Alekseye-
vich’s heart sank: he had a premonition of disaster. On the
Sunday after the Annunciation he went to the market, carrying
the proclamation with him. One of his sympathizers among the
old workers saw him there and said: “Viktor, you ought to burn
that piece of paper for the time being; how about it?” And Viktor
felt clearly that he had written it too soon, and that he should
burn it. “ll burn it right now! You’re right.” And he started
home to burn it. But right there in the market two pleasant young
men called out to him: “Viktor Alekseyevich! Come along with
us!” And they took him to the Lubyanka in a private car. When
they got him there, they had been in such a hurry and were so
excited that they didn’t search him in the usual way, and there
was a moment when the Emperor almost destroyed his proclama-
tion in the toilet. But he decided that it would be the worse for
him, that they would keep after him anyway to find out where it
was. And they straightaway took him in an elevator up to a
general and a colonel, and the general with his own hands
grabbed the proclamation from Viktor’s pocket.

234 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

_ However, it took only one interrogation for the Big Lubyanka
to quiet down again. It turned out to be not so dangerous. Ten
arrests in the garage of the auto depot and four in the garage of
the People’s Commissariat of Petroleum. The interrogation was
turned over to a lieutenant colonel, who had a good laugh as he
went through the proclamation:

“You write here, Your Majesty: ‘In the first spring I will
instruct my Minister of Agriculture to dissolve the collective
farms.’ But how are you going to divide up the tools and live-
_ stock? You haven’t got it worked out yet. And then you also
write: ‘I am going to increase housing construction and house
each person next to the place he works, and I am going to raise
all the workers’ wages.’ And where are you going to find the
money, Your Majesty? Are you going to have to run the money
off on printing presses? You are going to abolish the state loans.
And then, too: ‘I am going to wipe the Kremlin from the face
of the earth.” But where are you going to put your own govern-
ment? What about the building of the Big Lubyanka? Would you
like to take a tour of inspection and look it over?”

_ Many of the younger interrogators also stopped by to make
fun of the Emperor of All Russia. They saw nothing except
comedy in all this.

And it was not always easy for us in the cell to keep a straight
face. “We hope you aren’t going to forget us here in Cell
No. 53,” said Z——v, winking at the rest of us.

Everyone laughed at him.

Viktor Alekseyevich, with his white eyebrows and innocent
simplicity and his callused hands, would treat us when he received
boiled potatoes from. his unfortunate mother, Pelageya, without
ever dividing them into ‘ “yours” and mine”: “Come on, com-
rades, eat up, eat up!”

He used to smile shyly. He understood perfectly well how
uncontemporary and funny all this was—to be the Emperor of
All Russia. But what could he do if God’s choice had fallen
on him?

They soon removed him from our cell.”

24. When they introduced me to Khrushchev in 1962, I wanted to say to

him: “Nikita Sergeyevich! You and I have an acquaintance in common.” But
I told him something else, more urgent, on behalf of former prisoners.

First Cell, First Love | 235

Just before May 1 they took down the blackout shade on the
window. The war was perceptibly coming to an end.

That evening it was quieter than ever before in the Lubyanka.
It was, I remember, almost like the second day of Easter, since
May Day and Easter came one after the other that year. All the
interrogators were out in Moscow celebrating. No one was taken
to interrogation. In the silence we could hear someone across
the corridor protesting. They took him from the cell and into a
box. By listening, we could detect the location of all the doors.
They left the door of the box open, and they kept beating him a
long time. In the suspended silence every blow on his soft and
choking mouth could be heard clearly.

On May 2 a thirty-gun salute roared out. That meant a Euro-
pean capital. Only two had not yet been captured—Prague and
Berlin. We tried to guess which it was.

On the ninth of May they brought us our dinner at the same
time as our lunch—which was done at the Lubyanka only on
May 1 and November 7.

And that is how we guessed that the war had ended.

That evening they shot off another thirty-gun salute. We then
knew that there were no more capitals to be captured. And later
that same evening one more salute roared out—forty guns, I
seem to remember. And that was the end of all the ends.

Above the muzzle of our window, and from all the other cells
of the Lubyanka, and from all the windows of all the Moscow
prisons, we, too, former prisoners of war and former front-line
soldiers, watched the Moscow heavens, patterned with fireworks
and crisscrossed by the beams of searchlights.

Boris Gammerov, a young antitank man, already demobilized
because of wounds, with an incurable wound in his lung, having
been arrested with a group of students, was in prison that ‘eve-
ning in an overcrowded Butyrki cell, where half the inmates were
former POW’s and front-line soldiers. He described this last salute
of the war in a terse eight-stanza poem, in the most ordinary lan-
guage: how they were already lying down on their board bunks,
covered with their overcoats; how they were awakened hy the

236 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

noise; how they raised their heads; squinted up at the muzzle—
“Oh, it’s just a salute”’—and then lay down again:

And once again covered themselves with their coats.

With those same overcoats which had been in the clay of the
trenches, and the ashes of bonfires, and been torn to tatters by
German shell fragments.

That victory was not for us. And that spring was not for us
either.

Chapter 6

That Spring

Through the windows of the Butyrki Prison every morning and
evening in June, 1945, we could hear the brassy notes of bands
not far away—coming from either Lesnaya Street or Novoslo-
bodskaya. They kept playing marches over and over.

Behind the murky green “muzzles” of reinforced glass, we stood
at the wide-open but impenetrable prison windows and listened.
Were they military units that were marching? Or were they work-
ers cheerfully devoting their free time to marching practice? We
didn’t know, but the rumor had already gotten through to us that
preparations were under way for a big Victory Parade on Red
Square on June 22—the fourth anniversary of the beginning
of the war.

The foundation stones of a great building are destined to groan
and be pressed upon; it is not for them to crown the edifice. But
even the honor of being part of the foundation was denied those
whose doomed heads and ribs had borne the first blows of this
war and thwarted the foreigners’ victory, and who were now
abandoned for no good reason.

“Joyful sounds mean nought to the traitor.”

That spring of 1945 was, in our prisons, predominantly the
spring of the Russian prisoners of war. They passed through
the prisons of the Soviet Union in vast dense gray shoals like
ocean herring. The first trace of those schools I glimpsed was
Yuri Y. But I was soon entirely surrounded by their purposeful
motion, which seemed to know its own fated design.

237

238 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

Not only war prisoners passed through those cells. A wave of
those who had spent any time in Europe was rolling too:
émigrés from the Civil War; the. “ostovtsy”—workers recruited
as laborers by the Germans during World War II; Red Army
officers who had been too astute and farsighted in their con-
clusions, so that Stalin feared they might bring European free-
dom back from their European crusade, like the Decembrists
120 years before. And yet it was the war prisoners who consti-
tuted the bulk of the wave. And among the war prisoners of
various ages, most were of my own age—not precisely my age,
but the twins of October, those born along with the Revolution,
who in 1937 had poured forth undismayed to celebrate the
twentieth anniversary of the Revolution, and whose age group, at
the beginning of the war, made up the standing army—which
had been scattered in a matter of weeks.

That tedious prison spring had, to the tune of the victory
marches, become the spring of reckoning for my whole genera-
tion.

Over our cradles the rallying cry had resounded: “All power
to the Soviets!” It was we who had reached out our suntanned
childish hands to clutch the Pioneers’ bugle, and who in response
to the Pioneer challenge, “Be prepared,” had saluted and an-
swered: “We are always prepared!” It was we who had smuggled
weapons into Buchenwald and joined the Communist Party there.
And it was we who were now in disgrace, only because we had
survived.*

Back when the Red Army had cut through East Prussia, I
had seen downcast columns of returning war prisoners—the only
people around who were grieving instead of celebrating. Even
then their gloom had shocked me, though I didn’t yet grasp the
reason for it. I jumped down and went over to those voluntarily
formed-up columns. (Why were they marching in columns? Why
had they lined themselves up in ranks? After all, no one had
compelled them to, and the war prisoners of all other nations
went home as scattered individuals. But ours wanted to return as
submissively as possible.) I was wearing a captain’s shoulder

1. Those prisoners who had been in Buchenwald and survived were, in fact,
imprisoned for that very reason in our own camps: How could you have sur-
vived an annihilation camp? Something doesn’t smell right!

That Spring | 239

boards, and they, plus the fact that I was moving forward, helped
prevent my finding out why our POW’s were so sad. But then
fate turned me around and sent me in the wake of those prisoners
along the same path they had taken. I had already marched with
them from army counterintelligence headquarters to the head-
quarters at the front, and when we got there I had heard their
first stories, which I didn’t yet understand; and then Yuri Y.
told me the whole thing. And here beneath the domes of the
brick-red Butyrki castle, I felt that the story of these several mil-
lion Russian prisoners had got me in its grip once and for all, like
a pin through a specimen beetle. My own story of landing in
prison seemed insignificant. I stopped regretting my torn-off
shoulder boards. It was mere chance that had kept me from end-
ing up exactly where these contemporaries of mine had ended.
I came to understand that it was my duty to take upon my
shoulders a share of their common burden—and to bear it to the
last man, until it crushed us. I now felt as if I, too, had fallen
prisoner at the Solovyev crossing, in the Kharkov encirclement,
in the quarries of Kerch, and, hands behind my back, had carried
my Soviet pride behind the barbed wire of the concentration
camps; that I, too, had stood for hours in the freezing cold for
a ladle of cold Kawa (an ersatz coffee) and had been left on the
ground for dead, without even reaching the kettle; that in Oflag 68
(Suwalki) I had used my hands and the lid of a mess tin to dig
a bell-shaped (upturned, that is) foxhole, so as not to have to
spend the winter on the open field; and that a maddened prisoner
had crawled up to me as I lay dying to gnaw on the still warm
flesh beneath my arm; and with every new day of exacerbated,
. famished consciousness, lying in a barracks riddled with typhus,
or at the barbed wire of the neighboring camp for English
POW’s, the clear thought had penetrated my dying brain: Soviet
Russia has renounced her dying children. She had needed them,
“proud sons of Russia,” as long as they let the tanks roll over
them and it was still possible to rouse them to attack. But to feed
them once they were war prisoners? Extra mouths. And extra
witnesses to humiliating defeats. |
Sometimes we try to lie but our tongue will not allow us to.
These people were labeled traitors, but a remarkable slip of the
tongue occurred—on the part of the judges, prosecutors, and

240 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

interrogators. And the convicted prisoners, the entire nation, and
the newspapers repeated and reinforced this mistake, involuntarily
letting the truth out of the bag. They intended to declare them
“traitors to the Motherland.” But they were universally referred
to, in speech and in writing, even in the court documents, as
“traitors of the Motherland.”

You said it! They were not traitors to her. They were her
traitors. It was not they, the unfortunates, who had betrayed the
Motherland, but their calculating Motherland who had betrayed
them, and not just once but thrice.

The first time she betrayed them was on the battlefield, through
ineptitude—when the government, so beloved by the Mother-
land, did everything it could to lose the war: destroyed the lines
of fortifications; set up the whole air force for annihilation; dis-
mantled the tanks and artillery; removed the effective generals;
and forbade the armies to resist.” And the war prisoners were the
men whose bodies took the blow and stopped the Wehrmacht.

The second time they were heartlessly betrayed by the Mother-
land was when she abandoned them to die in captivity.

And the third time they were unscrupulously betrayed was
when, with motherly love, she coaxed them to return home, with
such phrases as “The Motherland has forgiven you! The Mother-
land calls you!” and snared them the moment they reached the
frontiers.®

It would appear that during the one thousand one hundred
years of Russia’s existence as a state there have been, ah, how
many foul and terrible deeds! But among them was there ever so
multimillioned foul a deed as this: to betray one’s own soldiers
and proclaim them traitors?

How easily we left them out of our own accounting! He was
a traitor? For shame! Write him off! And our Father wrote them
off, even before we did: he threw the flower of Moscow’s in-
telligentsia into the Vyazma meat grinder with Berdan single-

2. Now, after twenty-seven years, the first honest work on this subject has
appeared—P. G. Grigorenko, “A Letter to the Magazine Problems of the His-
tory of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,” samizdat, 1968—and such
works are going to multiply from here on out. Not all the witnesses died. And
soon no one will call Stalin’s government anything but a government of insanity
and treason. |

3. One of the biggest war criminals, Colonel General Golikov, former chief
of the Red Army’s intelligence administration, was put in charge of coaxing the
repatriates home and swallowing them up.

That Spring | 241

loading rifles, vintage 1866, and only one for every five men at
that. What Lev Tolstoi is going to describe that Borodino for us?
And with one stupid slither of his greasy, stubby finger, the Great
Strategist sent 120,000 of our young men, almost as many as all
the Russian forces at Borodino, across the Strait of Kerch in
December, 1941—-senselessly, and exclusively for the sake of a
sensational New Year’s communiqué—and he turned them all
over to the Germans without a fight.

And yet, for some reason, it was not he who was the traitor,
but they.

(How easily we let ourselves be taken in by partisan labels; how
easily we agreed to regard these devoted men as—traitors! In
one of the Butyrki cells that spring, there was an old man,
Lebedev, a metallurgist, a professor in rank, and in appearance a
stalwart artisan of the last century or maybe even the century
before, from, say, the famous Demidov iron foundries. He was
broad of shoulder, broad of head, wore a Pugachev-like beard,
and the wide span of his hand could lift a 150-pound bucket.
In the cell he wore a faded gray laborer’s smock over his under-
wear; he was slovenly and might have been an auxiliary prison
worker—until he sat down to read, and then his habitual powerful
intelligence lit up his face. The men often gathered around him.
He discussed metallurgy very little, but explained to us in his
kettledrum bass voice that Stalin was exactly the same kind of
dog as Ivan the Terrible: “Shoot!” “Strangle!” “Don’t hesitate!”
He explained to us also that Maxim Gorky had been a slobbering
prattler, an apologist for executioners. I was very much taken
with this Lebedev. It was as though the whole Russian people
were embodied, there before my eyes, in that one thick-set torso
with that intelligent head and the arms and legs of a plowman.
He had already thought through so much! I learned from him
to understand the world! And suddenly, with a chopping gesture
of his huge hand, he thundered out that those charged under
Article 58-1b were traitors of the Motherland and must not be
forgiven. And those very same Jb’s were piled up on the board
bunks all around. And how hurtful to them this was! The old
man was pontificating with such conviction in the name of Rus-
sia’s peasantry and labor that they were abashed and found it hard
to defend themselves against the attack from this new direction.
I was the one to whom it fell, along with two boys charged under

242 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO.

58-10, to defend them and to argue with the old man. But what —
depths of enforced ignorance were achieved by the monstrous
lies of the state. Even the most broad-minded of us can embrace
only that part of the truth into which our own snout has blun-
dered. )*

How many wars Russia has been involved in! 1 It would have
been better if there had been fewer.) And were there many
traitors in all those wars? Had anyone observed that treason had
become deeply rooted in the hearts of Russian soldiers? Then,
under the most just social system in the world, came the most just
war of all—and out of nowhere millions of traitors appeared,
from among the simplest, lowliest elements of the population.
How is this to be understood and explained?

Capitalist England fought at our side against Hitler; Marx
had eloquently described the poverty and suffering of the work-
ing class in that same England. Why was it that in this war only
one traitor could be found among them, the businessman “Lord
Haw Haw”—but in our country millions?

It is frightening to open one’s trap about this, but might the .
heart of the matter not be in the political system?

One of our most ancient proverbs justifies the war prisoner: `
“The captive will cry out, but the dead man never.” During the
reign of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, nobility was granted for
durance in captivity! And in all subsequent wars it was considered
society’s duty to exchange prisoners, to comfort one’s own and
to give them sustenance and aid. Every escape from captivity was
glorified as the height of heroism. Throughout World War I,
money was collected in Russia to aid our prisoners of war, and
our nurses were permitted to go to Germany to help our prisoners,
and our newspapers reminded their readers daily that our pris-
oners of war, our compatriots, were languishing in evil captivity.

4. Vitkovsky writes about this, on the basis of the thirties, in more general
terms. It was astonishing that the pseudo wreckers, who knew perfectly well
that they weren’t wreckers, believed that military men and priests were being.
shaken up justifiably. The military men, who knew they hadn't worked for
foreign intelligence services and had not sabotaged the Red Army, believed
readily enough that the engineers were wreckers and that the priests deserved
to be destroyed. Imprisoned, the Soviet person reasoned in the following way:
I personally am innocent, but any methods are justified in dealing with those
others, the enemies. The lessons of interrogation and the cell failed to enlighten
such people. Even after they themselves had been convicted, they retained
the blind beliefs of their days in freedom: belief in universal conspiracies, poi-
sonings, wrecking, espionage.

That Spring | 243

All the Western peoples behaved the same in our war: parcels,
letters, all kinds of assistance flowed freely through the neutral
countries. The Western POW’s did not have to lower themselves
to accept ladlefuls from German soup kettles. They talked back
to the German guards. Western governments gave their captured
soldiers their seniority rights, their regular promotions, even
their pay.

The only soldier in the world who cannot surrender is the
soldier of the world’s one and only Red Army. That’s what it says
in our military statutes. (The Germans would shout at us from
their trenches: “Ivan plen nicht!”—“Ivan no prisoner!”) Who
can picture all that means? There is war; there is death—but
there is no surrender! What a discovery! What it means is: Go
and die; we will go on living. And if you lose your legs, yet man-
age to return from captivity on crutches, we will convict you.
(The Leningrader Ivanov, commander of a machine-gun platoon
in the Finnish War, was subsequently thus imprisoned in Ustvym-
lag, for example. )

Our soldiers alone, renounced by their Motherland and de-
graded to nothing in the eyes of enemies and allies, had to push
their way to the swine swill being doled out in the backyards of
the Third Reich. Our soldiers alone had the doors shut tight to
keep them from returning to their homes, although their young
souls tried hard not to believe this. There was something called
Article 58-1b—and, in wartime, it provided only for execution
by shooting! For not wanting to die from a German bullet, the
prisoner had to die from a Soviet bullet for having been a prisoner
of war! Some get theirs from the enemy; we get it from our own!

Incidentally, it is very naive to say What for? At no time have
governments been moralists. They never imprisoned people and
executed them for having done something. They imprisoned and
executed them to keep them from doing something. They im-
prisoned all those POW’s, of course, not for treason to the Mother-
land, because it was absolutely clear even to a fool that only the
Vlasov men could be accused of treason. They imprisoned all
of them to keep them from telling their fellow villagers about
Europe. What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve for.

What, then, were the courses of action open to Russian war
prisoners? There was only one legally acceptable course: to lie

244 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

down and let oneself be trampled to death. Every blade of grass
pushes its fragile length upward in order to live. As for you—
lie down and be trampled on. Even though you’ve been slow
about it, even though you couldn’t do it on the battlefield, at least
die now; then you will not be prosecuted.

The soldiers sleep. They spoke their word
And they are right for eternity.

And every other path which, in desperation, your mind may
invent is going to lead you into conflict with the Law.

Escape and return to the Motherland—past the guards ring-
ing the camp, across half Germany, then through Poland or the
Balkans—led straight to SMERSH and prison. They were asked:
How did you manage to escape when others couldn’t? This stinks!
Come on, you rat, what assignment did they give you? (Mikhail
_ Burnatsev, Pavel Bondarenko, and many, many others. )*
Escaping to the Western partisans, to the Resistance forces,

5. It has become the accepted thing for our literary critics to say that Shol-
okhov, in his immortal story “Sudba Cheloveka”—“The Fate of a Man”—
spoke the “bitter truth” about “this side of our life” and that he “revealed” the
problem. But we must retort that in this story, which is in general very inferior,
and in which the passages about the war are pale and unconvincing—-since the
author evidently knew nothing about the last war—and the descriptions of
Germans are unconvincing cartoon clichés (only the hero’s wife is successfully
portrayed—because she is a pure Christian straight out of Dostoyevsky), in
this story about a war prisoner, the real problem of the war prisoners was
hidden or distorted:

(1) The author picked the least incriminating form of being taken prisoner
conceivable—the soldier was captured while unconscious, so as to make him
noncontroversial and to bypass the whole poignancy of the problem. (What if
he had been conscious when he was taken prisoner, as was most often the
case? What would have happened to him then?)

(2) The fact that the Motherland had deserted us, had renounced us, had
cursed us, was not presented as the war prisoner’s chief problem. Sholokhov
says not a word about it. But it was because of that particular factor that there
was no way out. On the contrary, he identifies the presence of traitors among
us as constituting the problem. (But if this really was the main thing, one
might then expect him to have investigated further and explained where they
came from a full quarter-century after a Revolution that was supported by
the entire people!)

(3) Sholokhov dreamed up a fantastic, spy-story escape from captivity,
stretching innumerable points to avoid the obligatory, inevitable procedural step
of the returned war prisoner’s reception in SMERSH—the Identification and
Screening Camp. Not only was Sokolov, the hero, not put behind barbed wire,
as provided in the regulations, but—and this is a real joke—he was given a
month’s holiday by his colonel! (In other words: the freedom to carry out
the assignment given him by the Fascist intelligence service. So his colonel
would end up in the same place as he!)

That Spring | 245

only postponed your full reckoning with the military tribunal;
also, it made you still more dangerous. You could have acquired
a very harmful spirit through living freely among Europeans. And
if you had not been afraid to escape and continue to fight, it
meant you were a determined person and thus doubly dangerous
in the Motherland.

Did you survive POW camp at the expense of your com-
patriots and comrades? Did you become a member of the camp
Polizei, or a commandant, a helper of the Germans and of death?
Stalinist law did not punish you any more severely than if you
had operated with the Resistance forces. It was the same article
of the Code and the same term—and one could guess why too.
Such a person was less dangerous. But the inert law that is in-
explicably implanted in us forbade this path to all except the
dregs.

In addition to those four possibilities—either impossible or un-
acceptable—there was a fifth: to wait for German recruiters, to
see what they would summon you to.

Sometimes, fortunately, representatives came from German
rural districts to select hired men for their farmers. Sometimes
they came from corporations and picked out engineers and
mechanics. According to the supreme Stalinist imperative you
should have rejected that too. You should have concealed the fact
that you were an engineer. You should have concealed the fact
that you were a skilled worker. As an industrial designer or
electrician, you could have preserved your patriotic purity only
if you had stayed in the POW camp to dig in the earth, to rot, to
pick through the garbage heap. In that case, for pure treason to
the Motherland, you could count on getting, your head raised
high in pride, ten years in prison and five more “muzzled.”
Whereas for treason to the Motherland aggravated by working for
the enemy, especially in one’s own profession, you got, with
bowed head, the same ten years in prison and five more muzzled.

And that was the jeweler’s precision of a behemoth—Stalin’s
trademark.

Now and then recruiters turned up who were of quite a dif-
ferent stripe—Russians, usually recent Communist political com-
missars. White Guards didn’t accept that type of employment.
These recruiters scheduled a meeting in the camp, condemned the

246 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

Soviet regime, and appealed to prisoners to enlist in spy schools
or in Vlasov units.

People who have never starved as our war prisoners did, who
have never gnawed on bats that happened to fly into the barracks,
who have never had to boil the soles of old shoes, will never
understand the irresistible material force exerted by any kind
of appeal, any kind of argument whatever, if behind it, on the
other side of the camp gates, smoke rises from a field kitchen, and
if everyone who signs up is fed a bellyful of kasha right then and
there—if only once! Just once more before I die!

And hovering over the steaming kasha and the inducements of
the recruiter was the apparition of freedom and a real life—
wherever it might call! To the Vlasov battalions. To the Cossack
regiments of Krasnov. To the labor battalions—pouring cement
in the future Atlantic Wall. To the fjords of Norway. To the
sands of Libya. To the “Hiwi” units (“Hilfswillige’—volunteers
in the German Wehrmacht—there being twelve “Hiwi” men in
each German company). And then, finally, to the village Polizei,
who pursued and caught partisans—many of whom the Mother-
land would also renounce. Wherever it might call, any place at
all, at least anything so as not to stay there and die like abandoned
cattle.

We ourselves released from every obligation, not merely to his
Motherland but to all humanity, the human being whom we
drove to gnawing on bats.

And those of our boys who agreed to become half-baked spies
still had not drawn any drastic conclusions from their abandoned
state; they were still, in fact, acting very patriotically. They saw
this course as the least difficult means of getting out of POW
camp. Almost to a man, they decided that as soon as the Germans
sent them across to the Soviet side, they would turn themselves
in to the authorities, turn in their equipment and instructions,
and join their own benign command in laughing at the stupid
Germans. They would then put on their Red Army uniforms and
return to fight bravely in their units. And tell me, who, speaking
in human terms, could have expected anything else? How could it
have been any other way? These were straightforward, sincere
men. I saw many of them. They had honest round faces and spoke
with an attractive Vyatka or Vladimir accent. They boldly joined

That Spring | 247

up as spies, even though they'd had only four or five grades of
rural school and were not even competent to cope with map and
compass.

It appears that they picked. the only way. out they could. And
one would suppose that the whole thing was an expensive and
stupid game on the part of the German Command. But no! Hitler
played in rhythm and in tune with his brother dictator! Spy mania
was one of the fundamental aspects of Stalin’s insanity. It seemed
to Stalin that the country was swarming with spies. All the Chinese
who lived in the Soviet Far East were convicted as spies—Article
58-6—and were taken to the northern camps, where they perished.
The same fate had awaited Chinese participants in the Soviet
civil war—if they hadn't cleared out in time. Several hundred
thousand Koreans were exiled to Kazakhstan, all similarly ac-
cused of spying. All Soviet citizens who at one time or another
had lived abroad, who at one time or another had hung around
Intourist hotels, who at one time or another happened to be
photographed: next to a foreigner, or who had themselves photo-
graphed a city building (the Golden Gate in Vladimir) were
accused of the same crime. Those who stared too long at railroad
tracks, at a highway bridge, at a factory chimney were similarly
charged. All the numerous foreign Communists stranded in the
Soviet Union, all. the big and little Comintern officials and em-
ployees, one after another, without any individual distinctions,
were charged first of all with espionage.® And the Latvian Rifle-
men—whose bayonets were the most reliable in the first years
of the Revolution—were also accused of espionage when they
were arrested to a man in 1937. Stalin seems somehow to have
twisted around and maximized the. famous declaration of that
coquette Catherine the Great: he would rather that 999 innocent
men should rot than miss one genuine spy. Given all this, how
could one believe and trust Russian soldiers who had really been
in the hands of the German. intelligence service? And how it
eased the burden for the MGB executioners when thousands of
soldiers pouring in from Europe did not even try to conceal that
they had voluntarily enlisted as spies. What an astonishing con-

6. Iosip Tito just barely escaped this fate. And Popov and Tanev, fellow
defendants of Dimitrov in the Leipzig trial, both got prison terms. (For Dimi-
trov himself Stalin prepared’ another fate.)

248 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

firmation of the predictions of the Wisest of the Wise! Come on,
keep coming, you silly fools! The article and the retribution have
long since been waiting for you! ©

But it is appropriate to ask one thing more. There still were
prisoners of war who did not accept recruiting offers, who never
worked for the Germans at their profession or trade, and who
were not camp police, who spent the whole war in POW camps,
without sticking their noses outside, and who, in spite of every-
thing, did not die, however unlikely this was. For example, they
made cigarette lighters out of scrap metal, like the electrical
engineers Nikolai Andreyevich Semyonov and Fyodor Fyodoro-
vich Karpov, and in that way managed to get enough to eat. And
did the Motherland forgive them for surrendering?

No, it did not forgive them! I met both Semyonov and Karpov
in the Butyrki after they had already received their lawful sen-
tence. And what was it? The alert reader already knows: ten
_years of imprisonment and five muzzled. As brilliant engineers,
they had rejected German offers to work at their profession. In
1941 Junior Lieutenant Semyonov had gone to the front as a
volunteer. In 1942 he still didn’t have a revolver; instead, he had
an empty holster—and the interrogator could not understand
why he hadn’t shot himself with his holster! He had escaped from
captivity three times. And in 1945, after he had been liberated
from a concentration camp, seated atop a tank as a member of
a penalty unit of tank-borne infantry, he took part in the capture
of Berlin and received the Order of the Red Star. Yet, after all
that, he was finally imprisoned and sentenced. All of this mirrored
our Nemesis. l

Very few of the war prisoners returned across the Soviet border
as free men, and if one happened to get through by accident be-
cause of the prevailing chaos, he was seized later on, even as late
as 1946 or 1947. Some were arrested at assembly points in Ger-
many. Others weren’t arrested openly right away but were trans-
ported from the border in freight cars, under convoy, to one of
the numerous Identification and Screening Camps (PFL’s) scat-
tered throughout the country. These camps differed in no way
from the common run of Corrective Labor Camps (ITL’s) ex-
cept that their prisoners had not yet been sentenced but would
be sentenced there. All these PFL’s were also attached to some

That Spring | 249

kind of factory, or mine, or construction project, and the former
POW’s, looking out on the Motherland newly restored to them
through the same barbed wire through which they had seen
Germany, could begin work from their first day on a ten-hour
work day. Those under suspicion were questioned during their
rest periods, in the evenings, and at night, and there were large
numbers of Security officers and interrogators in the PFL’s for
this purpose. As always, the interrogation began with the
hypothesis that you were obviously guilty. And you, without
going outside the barbed wire, had to prove that you were not
guilty. Your only available means to this end was to rely on
witnesses who were exactly the same kind of POW’s as you.
Obviously they might not have turned up in your own PFL; they
might, in fact, be at the other end of the country; in that case, the
Security officers of, say, Kemerovo would send off inquiries to
the Security officers of Solikamsk, who would question the wit-
nesses and send back their answers along with new inquiries,
and you yourself would be questioned as a witness in some other
case. True, it might take a year or two before your fate was
resolved, but after all, the Motherland was losing nothing in the
process. You were out mining coal every day. And if one of
your witnesses gave the wrong sort of testimony about you, or if
none of your witnesses was alive, you had only yourself to blame,
and you were sure to be entered in the documents as a traitor of
the Motherland. And the visiting military court would rubber-
stamp your tenner. And if, despite all their twisting things about,
it appeared that you really hadn’t worked for the Germans, and
if—and this was the main point—you had not had the chance
to see the Americans and English with your own eyes (to have
been liberated from captivity by them instead of by us was a
gravely aggravating circumstance), then the Security officers
would decide the degree of isolation in which you were to be
held. Certain people were ordered to change their place of resi-
dence—which always breaks a person’s ties with his environment
and makes him more vulnerable. Others were valiantly offered
the chance to go to work in the VOKhR, the Militarized Guard
Service. In that situation, while nominally remaining free, a man
lost all his personal freedom and was sent off to some isolated
area. There was a third category: after a handshake, some were

250 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

humanely permitted to return home, although, even without
aggravating circumstances, they deserved to be shot for having
surrendered. But people in this category celebrated prematurely!
Even before the former prisoner arrived home, his case had
reached his home district through the secret channels of State
Security. These people remained eternally outsiders. And with
the first mass arrests, like those of 1948-1949, they were im-
mediately arrested for hostile propaganda or some other reason.
I was imprisoned with people in that category too.

“Oh, if I had only known!” That was the refrain in the prison
cells that spring. If I had only. known that this was how I would
be greeted! That they would deceive me so! That this would be
my fate! Would I have really returned to my Motherland? Not
for anything! I would have made my way to Switzerland, to
France! I would have gone across the sea, across the ocean!
Across three oceans!"

But the more thoughtful prisoners corrected them. They had
made their mistake earlier! They were stupid ‘to have dashed off
to the front lines in 1941. It takes a fool to rush off to war! Right
from the start, they should have gotten themselves set up in the
rear. Somewhere quiet. Those who did are heroes now. And it
would have been an even surer thing just to desert. Almost cer-
tainly, one’s skin would be whole. They didn’t get ten years
either—but eight, or seven. And they weren’t excluded from any
of the cushy jobs in camp. After all, a deserter was not regarded
as an enemy or a traitor or a political prisoner. He was con-
sidered not a hostile factor but a friendly one, a nonpolitical
offender, so to speak. That point of view aroused passionate

7. In actual fact, even when POW’s actually knew what would happen to
them, they behaved in exactly the same way. Vasily Aleksandrov was taken
prisoner in Finland. He was sought out there by ‘some elderly Petersburg
merchant who asked him his name and patronymic and then said: “In 1917 I
owed your grandfather a large debt, and I didn’t have the chance to pay it.
Here you are—take it!” An old debt is a windfall! After the war Aleksandrov
was accepted by the circle of Russian émigrés, and he got engaged to a girl
there whom he came to love—and not just casually. To educate him, his future
father-in-law gave him a bound set of Pravda—just as it was issued from 1918
to 1941, without any deletions or corrections. At the same time, he recounted
to him more or less completely. the history of the waves of arrests, as we have
set it forth in Chapter 2, above. And nevertheless . . . Aleksandrov abandoned
his fiancée, and his wealth, and returned to the U.S.S.R., where he was given,
as one can easily guess, fen years and disenfranchisement for five more. In 1953
he was happy to have managed to snag himself a job as foreman in a Special
Camp.

That Spring | 251

argument and objections. The deserters had to spend all those
years rotting in prison, and they would not be forgiven. But
there would soon be an amnesty for everyone else; they would
all be released. (At that time the principal advantage of being a
deserter was still unknown. )

Those who had gotten in via 58-10, snatched from their
apartments or from the Red Army, often envied the rest. What
the hell! For the very same money, in other words for the same
ten-year sentence, they could have seen so many interesting
things, like those other fellows, who had been just about every-
where! And here we are, about to croak in camp, without ever
having seen anything beyond our own stinking stairs. Inciden-
tally, those who were in on Article 58-10 could hardly conceal
their triumphant presentiment that they would be the first to be
amnestied.

The only ones who did not sigh: “Oh, if I had only known”—
because they knew very well what they were doing—and the
only ones who did not expect any mercy and did not expect an
amnesty—were the Vlasov men.

I had known about them and been perplexed about them long
before our unexpected meeting on the board bunks of prison.
First there had been the leaflets, repeatedly soaked through,
dried out, and lost in the high grass—uncut for the third year—
of the front-line strip near Orel. In December, 1942, they had
announced the creation in Smolensk of a “Russian Committee”
—which apparently claimed to be some sort of Russian govern-
ment and yet at the same time seemed not to be one. Evidently
the Germans themselves had not yet made up their minds. For
that reason, the communiqué seemed to be a hoax. There was a
photograph of General Vlasov in the leaflets, and his biography
was outlined. In the fuzzy photograph, his face looked well fed
and successful, like all our generals of the new stripe. They told
me later that this wasn’t so, that Vlasov’s face was more like that
of a Western general—high, thin, with horn-rimmed glasses. His
biography testified to a penchant for success. He had begun in
a peasant family, and 1937 had not broken his skyrocketing
career; nor was it ruined by his service as a military adviser to

252 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

Chiang Kai-shek. The first and only disaster of his earlier life
had occurred when his Second Shock Army, after being en-
circled, was ineptly abandoned to die of starvation. But how
much of that whole biography could be believed?®

8. As far as one can establish at this late date, Andrei Andreyevich Vlasov,
prevented by the Revolution from completing his studies at the Nizhni Nov-
gorod Orthodox Seminary, was drafted into the Red Army in 1919 and fought
as an enlisted man. On the southern front, against Denikin and Wrangel, he
rose to be commander of a platoon, then of a company. In the twenties he
completed the Vystrel courses. He became a member of the Communist Party
in 1930. In 1936, having attained the rank of regimental commander, he was
sent to China as a military adviser. Evidently he had no ties to the top military
and Party circles, and he therefore turned up naturally in that Stalinist “second
echelon” of officers promoted to replace the purged commanders of armies,
divisions, and brigades. From 1938 on he commanded a division. And in
1940, when “new” (in other words, old) officer ranks were created, he became
a major general. From additional information one can conclude that in that
corps of newly made generals, many of whom were totally stupid and inexperi-
enced, Vlasov was one of the most talented. His 99th Infantry Division, which ©
he had instructed and trained from the summer of 1940 on, was not caught
off balance by the German attack. On the contrary, while the rest of the army
reeled backward, his division advanced, retook Przemysl, and held it for six
days. Quickly skipping the rank of corps commander, in 1941 Lieutenant Gen-
eral Vlasov was in command of the Thirty-seventh Army near Kiev. He made
his way out of the enormous Kiev encirclement and in December, 1941, near
Moscow he commanded the Twentieth Army, whose successful Soviet counter-
Offensive for defense of the capital (the taking of Solnechnogorsk) was noted
in the Sovinformburo communiqué for December 12. And the list of generals
mentioned there was as follows: Zhukov, Lelyushenko, Kuznetsov, Vlasov,
Rokossovsky, Govorov. Thanks to the speed with which officers were promoted
in those months, he became Deputy Commander of the Volkhov Front (under
Meretskov), and took over command of the Second Shock Army. On January
7, 1942, at the head of that army, he began a drive to break the Leningrad
blockade—an attack across the Volkhov River to the northwest. This had
been planned as a combined operation, a concerted push from several direc-
tions and from Leningrad itself. At scheduled intervals the Fifty-fourth, the
Fourth, and the Fifty-second armies were to take part in it also. But those
three armies either did not advance because they were unready or else came
to a quick halt. At that time we still didn’t have the capacity to plan such
complex combined operations, and, more importantly, provide supplies for
them. Vlasov’s Second Shock Army, however, was successful in its assault, and
by February, 1942, it was 46 miles deep inside the German lines! And from
then on, the reckless Stalinist Supreme Command could find neither men nor
ammunition to reinforce even those troops. (That’s the kind of reserves they
had begun the offensive with!) Leningrad, too, was left to die behind the
blockade, having received no specific information from Novgorod. During
March the winter roads still held up. From April on, however, the entire
swampy area through which the Second Army had advanced melted into mud,
and there were no supply roads, and there was no help from the air. The army
was without food and, at the same time, Vlasov was refused permission to re-
treat. For two months they endured starvation and extermination. In the
Butyrki, soldiers from that army told me how they had cut off the hoofs of
dead and rotting horses and boiled the scrapings and eaten them. Then, on
May 14, a German attack was launched from all sides against the encircled

That Spring | 253

From his photograph, it was impossible to believe that he was
an outstanding man or that for long years he had suffered pro-
foundly for Russia. As for the leaflets reporting the creation of
the ROA, the “Russian Liberation Army,” not only were they
written in bad Russian, but they were imbued with an alien
spirit that was clearly German and, moreover, seemed little con-
cerned with their presumed subject; besides, and on the other
hand, they contained crude boasting about the plentiful chow
available and the cheery mood of the soldiers. Somehow one
couldn’t believe in that army, and, if it really did exist, what kind
of cheery mood could it be in? Only a German could lie like
that.°

army. The only planes in the air, of course, were German. And only then, in
mockery, were they given permission to pull back behind the Volkhov. They
made several hopeless attempts to break through—until the beginning of July.

And so it was that Vlasov’s Second Shock Army perished, literally recapitu-
lating the fate of Samsonov’s Russian Second Army in World War I, having
been just as insanely thrown into encirclement.

Now this, of course, was treason to the Motherland! This, of course, was
vicious, self-obsessed betrayal! But it was Stalin’s. Treason does not necessarily
involve selling out for money. It can include ignorance and carelessness in the
preparations for war, confusion and cowardice at its very start, the meaningless
sacrifice of armies and corps solely for the sake of saving one’s own marshal’s
uniform. Indeed, what more bitter treason is there on the part of a Supreme
Commander in Chief?

Unlike Samsonov, Vlasov did not commit suicide. After his army had been
wiped out, he wandered among the woods and swamps and, on July 6, per-
sonally surrendered in the area of Siverskaya. He was taken to the German
headquarters near Létzen in East Prussia, where they were holding several
captured generals and a brigade political commissar, G. N. Zhilenkov, formerly
a successful Party official and secretary of one of the Moscow District Party
Committees. These captives had already confessed their disagreement with the
policy of the Stalin government. But they had no real leader. Vlasov became it.

9. In reality there was no Russian Liberation Army until almost the very
end of the war. Both the name and the insignia devised for it were invented
by a German of Russian origin, Captain Strik-Strikfeldt, in the Ost-Propaganda-
Abteilung. Although he held only a minor position, he had influence, and he
tried to convince the Hitlerite leadership that a German-Russian alliance was
essential and that the Russians should be encouraged to collaborate with Ger-
many. A vain undertaking for both sides! Each side wanted only to use and
deceive the other. But, in the given situation, the Germans had power—they
were on top of the setup. And the Vlasov officers had only their fantasy—at
the bottom of the abyss. There was no such army, but anti-Soviet formations
made up of Soviet citizens were organized from the very start of the war. The
first to support the Germans were the Lithuanians. In the one year we had
been there we had aroused their deep, angry hostility! And then the SS-Galicia
Division was created from Ukrainian volunteers. And Estonian units afterward.
In the fall of 1941, guard companies appeared in Byelorussia. And a Tatar
battalion in the Crimea. We ourselves had sowed the seeds of all this! Take,

254 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

We soon discovered that there really were Russians fighting
against us and that they fought harder than any SS men. In July,
1943, for example, near Orel, a platoon of Russians in German
uniform defended Sobakinskiye Vyselki. They fought with the
desperation that might have been expected if they had built the
place themselves. One of them was driven into a root cellar.
They threw hand grenades in after him and he fell silent. But
they had no more than stuck their heads in than he let them
have another volley from his automatic pistol. Only when they
lobbed in an antitank grenade did they find out that, within the
root cellar, he had another foxhole in which he had taken shelter
from the infantry grenades. Just try to imagine the degree of
shock, deafness, and hopelessness in which he had kept on
fighting.

They defended, for example, the unshakable Dnieper bridge-
head south of Tursk. For two weeks we continued to fight there
for a mere few hundred yards. The battles were fierce in Decem-
ber, 1943, and so was the cold. Through many long days both
we and they went through the extreme trials of winter, fighting

for example, our stupid twenty-year policy of closing and destroying the
Moslem mosques in the Crimea. And compare that with the policy of the
farsighted conqueror Catherine the Great, who contributed state funds for
building and expanding the Crimean mosques. And the Hitlerites, when they
arrived, were smart enough to present themselves as their defenders. Later,
Caucasian detachments and Cossack armies—more than a cavalry corps—put
in an appearance on the German side. In the first winter of the war, platoons
and companies of Russian volunteers began to be formed. But the German
Command was very distrustful of these Russian units, and their master ser-
geants and lieutenants were Germans. Only their noncoms below master ser-
geant were Russian. They also used such German commands as “Achtung!,”
“Halt!” etc. More significant and entirely Russian were the following units: a
brigade in Lokot, in Bryansk Province, from November, 1941, when a local
teacher of engineering, K. P. Voskoboinikov, proclaimed the “National Labor
Party of Russia” and issued a manifesto to the citizens of the nation, hoisting
the flag of St. George; a unit in the Osintorf settlement near Orsha, formed
at the beginning of 1942 under the leadership of Russian émigrés (it must be
said that only a small group of Russian émigrés joined this movement, and
even they did not conceal their anti-German feelings and allowed many cross-
overs [including a whole battalion] to the Soviet side . . . after which they
were dropped by the Germans); and a unit formed by Gil, in the summer of
1942, near Lublin. (V. V. Gil, a Communist Party member and even, it seems,
a Jew, not only survived as a POW but, with the help of other POW’s, became
the head of a camp near Suwalki and offered to create a “fighting alliance of
Russian nationalists” for the Germans.) However, there was as yet no Russian
Liberation Army in all of this and no Vlasov. The companies under German
command were put on the Russian front, as an experiment, and the Russian
units were sent against the Bryansk, Orsha, and Polish partisans.

That Spring | 255

in winter camouflage cloaks that covered our overcoats and caps.
Near Malye Kozlovichi, I was told, an interesting encounter took
place. As the soldiers dashed back and forth among the pines,
things got confused, and two soldiers lay down next to one
another. No longer very accurately oriented, 'they kept shooting
at someone, somewhere over there. Both had Soviet automatic
pistols. They shared their cartridges, praised one another, and
together swore at the grease freezing on their automatic pistols.
Finally, their pistols stopped firing altogether, and they decided
to take a break and light up. They pulled back their white hoods
—and at the same instant each saw the other’s cap . . . the eagle
and the star. They jumped up! Their automatic pistols still
refused to fire! Grabbing them by the barrel and swinging them
like clubs, they began to go at each other. This, if you will, was
not politics and not the Motherland, but just sheer caveman
distrust: If I take pity on him, he is going to kill me.

In East Prussia, a trio of captured Vlasov men was being
marched along the roadside a few steps away from me. At that
moment a T-34 tank thundered down the highway. Suddenly one
of the captives twisted around and dived underneath the tank.
The tank veered, but the edge of its track crushed him neverthe-
less. The broken man lay writhing, bloody foam coming from
his mouth. And one could certainly understand him! He pre-
ferred a soldier’s death to being hanged in a dungeon.

They had no choice. There was no other way for them to fight.
They had no chance to find a way out, to safeguard their lives, by
some more cautious mode of fighting. If “pure” surrender was
considered unforgivable treason to the Motherland, then what
about those who had taken up enemy arms? Our propaganda,
in all its crudity, explained their conduct as: (1) treason (was it
biologically based? carried in the bloodstream?) ; or (2) coward-
ice—which it certainly was not! A coward tries to find a spot
where things are easy, soft, safe. And men could be induced to
enter the Wehrmacht’s Vlasov detachments only in the last ex-
tremity, only at the limit of desperation, only out of inexhaustible
hatred of the Soviet regime, only with total contempt for their
own safety. For they knew they would never have the faintest
glimpse of mercy! When we captured them, we shot them as soon
as the first intelligible Russian word came from their mouths. In

256 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

Russian captivity, as in German captivity, the worst lot of all
was reserved for the Russians.

In general, this war revealed to us that the worst thing in the
world was to be a Russian.

I recall with shame an incident I observed during the liquida-
tion—in other words, the plundering—of the Bobruisk encircle-
ment, when I was walking along the highway among wrecked
and overturned German automobiles, and a wealth of booty lay
scattered everywhere. German cart horses wandered aimlessly
in and out of a shallow depression where wagons and automo-
biles that had gotten stuck were buried in the mud, and bonfires
of booty were smoking away. Then I heard a cry for help: “Mr.
Captain! Mr. Captain!” A prisoner on foot in German britches
was crying out to me in pure Russian. He was naked from the
waist up, and his face, chest, shoulders, and back were all
bloody, while a sergeant osobist, a Security man, seated on a
horse, drove him forward with a whip, pushing him with his
horse. He kept lashing that naked back up and down with the
whip, without letting him turn around, without letting him ask
for help. He drove him along, beating and beating him, raising
new crimson welts on his skin.

And this was not one of the Punic Wars, nor a war between
the Greeks and the Persians! Any officer, possessing any author-
ity, in any army on earth ought to have stopped that senseless
torture. In any army on earth, yes, but in ours? Given our fierce
and uncompromising method of dividing mankind? (If you are
not with us, if you are not our own, etc., then you deserve nothing
but contempt and annihilation.) So I was afraid to defend the
Vlasov man against the osobist. I said nothing and I did nothing.
I passed him by as if I could not hear him . . . so that I myself
would not be infected by that universally recognized plague.
(What if the Vlasov man was indeed some kind of supervillain?
Or maybe the osobist would think something was wrong with
me? And then?) Or, putting it more simply for anyone who
knows anything about the situation in the Soviet Army at that
time: would that osobist have paid any attention to an army
captain?

So the osobist continued to lash the defenseless man brutally
and drive him along like a beast.

This picture will remain etched in my mind forever. This, after

That Spring | 257

all, is almost a symbol of the Archipelago. It ought to be on the
jacket of this book.

The Vlasov men had a presentiment of all this; they knew it
ahead of time; nevertheless, on the left sleeve of their German
uniforms they sewed the shield with the white-blue-red edging,
the field of St. Andrew, and the letters “ROA.”?° The inhabitants

10. These letters became even better known, although, as before, there was
still no real Russian Liberation Army. The units were all scattered and kept
subordinate to German orders, and the Vlasov generals had nothing to do but
play cards in Dahlemdorf, near Berlin. By the middle of 1942, Voskoboinikov’s
brigade, which, after his death, was commanded by Kaminsky, numbered five
infantry regiments of 2,500 to 3,000 men each, with attached artillery crews,
a tank battalion consisting of two dozen Soviet tanks, and an artillery battalion
with three dozen guns. The commanding officers were POW officers, and the
rank and file was made up, in considerable part, of local Bryansk volunteers.
This brigade was under orders to guard the area against partisans. In the sum-
mer of 1942, the brigade of Gil-Blazhevich was transferred for the same
purpose from Poland, where it had been notable for its cruelty toward Poles
and Jews, to the area near Mogilev. At the beginning of 1943, its command
refused to acknowledge Vlasov’s authority, demanding that he explain why,
in his stated program, there was no reference to the “struggle against world
Jewry and Jew-loving commissars.” These were the very men—called the
Rodionovites, because Gil had changed his name to Rodionov—who in August,
1943, when Hitler’s approaching defeat became apparent, changed their black
flag with a silver skull to a red flag, and proclaimed Soviet authority and a large
“partisan region” in the northeast corner of Byelorussia.

At that time, Soviet newspapers began to write about the “partisan region,”
but without explaining its origins. Later on, all surviving Rodionovites were
imprisoned. And whom did the Germans immediately throw in against the
Rodionovites? The Kaminsky brigade! That was in May, 1944, and they also
threw in thirteen of their own divisions in an effort to liquidate the “partisan
region.” That was the extent to which Germans understood all those
tricolor cockades, St. George, and the field of St. Andrew. The Russian and
German languages were mutually untranslatable, inexpressible, uncorrelatable.
Still worse: in October, 1944, the Germans threw in Kaminsky’s brigade—
with its Moslem units—to suppress the Warsaw uprising. While one group of
Russians sat traitorously dozing beyond the Vistula, watching the death of
Warsaw through their binoculars, other Russians crushed the uprising! Hadn’t
the Poles had enough Russian villainy to bear in the nineteenth century with-
out having to endure more of it in the twentieth? For that matter, was that the
last of it? Perhaps more is still to come. The career of the Osintorf Battalion
was apparently more straightforward. This consisted of about six hundred
soldiers and two hundred officers, with an émigré command, I. K. Sakharov
and Lamsdorf, Russian uniforms, and a white-blue-red flag; it was thrown in
near Pskov. Then, reinforced to regimental strength, it was readied for a para-
chute drop on the line of Vologda-Archangel, the idea being to make use of
the nest of concentration camps in that area. Throughout 1943, Igor Sakharov
managed to prevent his unit from being sent against the partisans. But then
he was replaced and the battalion was first disarmed and imprisoned in a camp
and then sent off to the Western Front. Then, in the fall of 1943, the Germans
decided to send the Russian cannon fodder to the Atlantic Wall, and against
the French and Italian Resistance, having lost, forgotten, and not even tried
to recall its original purpose. Those among the Vlasov men who had managed
to retain some kind of political rationality or hope thereupon lost both.

258 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

of the occupied areas held them in contempt as German hire-
lings. So did the Germans, because of their Russian blood. Their
pitiful little newspapers were worked over with a German cen-
sor’s broadsword: Greater Germany and the Fihrer. And the
Vlasov men had one way out of all that—to fight to the death,
and, when they were not fighting, to down vodka and more
vodka. Foredoomed—that: was their existence during all their
years of war and alien lands; and there was no salvation for
them from any direction.

Hitler and those around him, even when they were retreating
on every front and were staring their own destruction in the face,
could still not overcome their intense distrust of wholly separate
Russian units; they could not bring themselves to organize divi-
sions that were entirely Russian, to allow even the shadow of a
Russia that was not totally subject to them. Only in the crack
of the final debacle, in November, 1944, was a belated theatrical
production at last permitted in Prague: the creation of a “Com-
mittee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia,” combining
all the different national groups, and a manifesto, which, like
everything that had preceded it, was neither fish nor fowl, since
the concept of a Russia independent of Germany and Nazism
was still not tolerated: Vlasov became chairman of the commit-
tee. And only in the fall of 1944 did they begin to form Vlasov
divisions that were exclusively Russian.** Probably the wise Ger-
man political leaders had concluded that at this point the Russian
workers in Germany (the “ostovtsy”) would rush to take up
arms. But the Red Army was already on the Vistula and the
Danube. And ironically, as though to confirm the farsightedness
of the very nearsighted Germans, those Vlasov divisions, in their
first and last independent action, dealt a blow—to the Germans
themselves. In the general disaster, Vlasov gathered up his two
and a half divisions near Prague at the end of April, without
coordinating his action with the German Supreme Command.
It became known at this point that SS General Steiner was pre-
paring to destroy the Czech capital rather than surrender it in-
tact. And Vlasov ordered his divisions to the aid of the Czech

11. They were: the ist, based on “the Kaminsky brigade,” under S. K.
Bunyachenko; the 2nd, under Zverev (former military commandant of Khar-

kov); half the 3rd; segments of the 4th; and Maltsev’s air force detachment.
Only four divisions were authorized..

That Spring | 259

rebels. And at that point, all the hurt, bitterness, and anger
against the Germans that had accumulated during three cruel
and futile years in the breasts of the enslaved Russians was
vented in the attack on the Germans. They were shoved out of
Prague from an unexpected direction. Did all Czechs realize
later which Russians had saved their city? Our own history is
similarly distorted; we claim that Prague was saved by Soviet
armies, although they couldn’t have gotten there in time.

Then the Vlasov army began to retreat toward Bavaria and
the Americans. They were pinning all their hopes on the possi-
bility of being useful to the Allies; in this way their years of
dangling in the German noose would finally become meaningful.
But the Americans greeted them with a wall of armor and forced
them to surrender to Soviet hands, as stipulated by the Yalta
Conference. In Austria that May, Churchill perpetrated the same
sort of “act of a loyal ally,” but, out of our accustomed modesty,
we did not publicize it. He turned over to the Soviet command
the Cossack corps of 90,000 men.” Along with them, he also

12. This surrender was an act of double-dealing consistent with the spirit of
traditional English diplomacy. The heart of the matter was that the Cossacks
were determined to fight to the death, or to cross the ocean, all the way to
Paraguay or Indochina if they had to . . . anything rather than surrender alive.
Therefore, the English proposed, first, that the Cossacks give up their arms
on the pretext of replacing them with standardized weapons. Then the officers
—without the enlisted men—were summoned to a supposed conference on the
future of the army in the city of Judenburg in the English occupation zone.
But the English had secretly turned the city over to the Soviet armies the night
before. Forty busloads of officers, all the way from commanders of companies
on up to General Krasnov himself, crossed a high viaduct and drove straight
down into a semicircle of Black Marias, next to which stood convoy guards
with lists in their hands. The road back was blocked by Soviet tanks. The officers
didn’t even have anything with which to shoot themselves or to stab themselves
to death, since their weapons had been taken away. They jumped from the
viaduct onto the paving stones below. Immediately afterward, and just as
treacherously, the English turned over the rank-and-file soldiers by the train-
load—pretending that they were on their way to receive new weapons from
their commanders.

In their own countries Roosevelt and Churchill are honored as embodiments
of statesmanlike wisdom. To us, in our Russian prison conversations, their
consistent shortsightedness and stupidity stood out as astonishingly obvious.
How could they, in their decline from 1941 to 1945, fail to secure any guar-
antees whatever of the independence of Eastern Europe? How could they give
away broad regions of Saxony and Thuringia in exchange for the preposterous
toy of a four-zone Berlin, their own future Achilles’ heel? And what was the
military or political sense in their surrendering to destruction at Stalin’s hands
hundreds of thousands of armed Soviet citizens determined not to surrender?
They say it was the price they paid for Stalin’s agreeing to enter the war against
Japan. With the atom bomb already in their hands, they paid Stalin for not

260 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

handed over many wagonloads of old people, women, and
children who did not want to return to their native Cossack
rivers. This great hero, monuments to whom will in time cover
all England, ordered that they, too, be surrendered to their
deaths.

In addition to the hurriedly created Vlasov divisions, quite a
few Russian subunits went right on turning sour in the depths of
the German Army, wearing standard German uniforms. They.
finished out the war on various sectors and in different ways.

I myself fell under Vlasov fire a few days before my arrest.
There were Russians in the East Prussian “sack” which we had
surrounded, and one night at the end of January their unit tried
to break through our position to the west, without artillery prepa-
ration, in silence. There was no firmly delineated front in any
case, and they penetrated us in depth, catching my sound-locator
battery, which was out in front, in a pincers. I just barely
managed to pull it back by the last remaining road. But then I
went back for a piece of damaged equipment, and, before dawn,
I watched as they suddenly rose from the snow where they’d dug
in, wearing their winter camouflage cloaks, hurled themselves
with a cheer on the battery of a 152-millimeter gun battalion at
Adlig Schwenkitten, and knocked out twelve heavy cannon with
hand grenades before they could fire a shot. Pursued by their
tracer bullets, our last little group ran almost two miles in fresh
snow to the bridge across the Passarge River. And there they
were stopped.

Soon after that I was arrested. And now, on the eve of the
Victory Parade, here we all were sitting together on the board
bunks of the Butyrki. I took puffs from their cigarettes and they
took puffs from mine. And paired with one or another of them,
I used to carry out the six-bucket tin latrine barrel.

Many of the Vlasov men, like the “spies for hire,” were

refusing to occupy Manchuria, for strengthening Mao Tse-tung in China, and
for giving Kim Il Sung control of half Korea! What bankruptcy of political
thought! And when, subsequently, the Russians pushed out Mikolajezyk, when
Benes and Masaryk came to their ends, when Berlin was blockaded, and Buda-
pest flamed and fell silent, and Korea went up in smoke, and Britain’s Con-
servatives fled from Suez, could one really believe that those among them
with the most accurate memories did not at least recall that episode of the
Cossacks?

That Spring | 261

young, born, say, between 1915 and 1922, that same “young
and unknown tribe” which hustling-bustling Lunacharsky had
hurried to greet in the name of Pushkin. Most of them got into
Vlasov military units through that same blind chance which led
their comrades in a neighboring camp to get into the spy thing
—it all depended on which recruiter had gone where.

The recruiters had explained to them jeeringly—or rather, it
would have been jeering if it hadn’t been the truth: “Stalin has
renounced you! Stalin doesn’t give a damn about you!”

Soviet law had outlawed them even before they outlawed
themselves.

So they signed up—some of them simply to get out of a death
camp, others with the hope of going over to the partisans. (And
some of them did! And fought side by side with the partisans!
But according to Stalin’s rules that didn’t soften their sentences
in the least.) However, in the case of some, the shame of 1941,
that stunning defeat after long, long years of braggadocio, ate at
their hearts. Some believed that the primary guilt for those in-
human POW camps belonged to Stalin. They, too, wanted the
chance to speak out about themselves and their awful experi-
ence: to affirm that they, too, were particles of Russia, and
wanted to influence Russia’s future, and not to be the puppets of
other people’s mistakes.

But fate played them an even bitterer trick, and they became
more abject pawns than before. The Germans, in their shallow
stupidity and self-importance, allowed them only to die for the
German Reich, but denied them the right to plan an independent
destiny for Russia.

And the Allies were two thousand versts away—and anyway,
what kind of allies would they indeed turn out to be?

The term “Vlasovite” in our country has the same force as
the word “sewage.” We feel we are dirtying our mouths merely
by pronouncing it, and therefore no one dares utter a sentence
with “Vlasovite” as its subject.

But that is no way to write history. Now, a quarter of a cen-
tury later, when most of them have perished in camps and those
who have survived are living out their lives in the Far North, I
would like to issue a reminder, through these pages, that this
was a phenomenon totally unheard of in all world history: that

262 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

several hundred thousand young men,” aged twenty to thirty,
took up arms against their Fatherland as allies of its most evil
enemy. Perhaps there is something to ponder here: Who was
more to blame, those youths or the gray Fatherland? One cannot
explain this treason biologically. It has to have had a social
cause.

Because, as the old proverb says: Well-fed horses don’t ram-
page.

Then picture to yourself a field in which starved, neglected,
crazed horses are rampaging back and forth.

That same spring many Russian émigrés were also in those cells.

It was very like a dream: the resurrection of buried history.
The weighty tomes on the Civil War had long since been com-
pleted and their covers shut tight. The causes for which people
fought in it had been decided. The chronology of its events had
been set down in textbooks. The leaders of the White movement
were, it appeared, no longer our contemporaries on earth but
mere ghosts of a past that had melted away. The Russian émigrés
had been more cruelly dispersed than the tribes of Israel. And,
in our Soviet imagination, if they were still dragging out their
lives somewhere, it was as pianists in stinking little restaurants,
as lackeys, laundresses, beggars, morphine and cocaine addicts,
and virtual corpses. Right up to 1941, when the war came, it
would have been impossible to find out from any hints in our
newspapers, our lofty literature, our criticism of the arts (nor
did our own well-fed masters of art and literature help us find
out) that Russia Abroad was a great spiritual world, that in it
Russian philosophy was living and developing; that out there
were philosophers like Bulgakov, Berdyayev, and Lossky; that
Russian art had enchanted the world; that Rachmaninoff, Chal-
iapin, Benois, Diaghilev, Pavlova, and the Don Cossack Chorus
of Jaroff were out there; that profound studies of Dostoyevsky
were being undertaken (at a time when he was anathema in the

13. This, in fact, is the number of Soviet citizens who were in the Wehr-
macht—in pre-Vlasov and Vlasov formations, and in the Cossack, Moslem,
Baltic, and Ukrainian units and detachments.

That Spring | 263

Soviet Union); that the incredible writer Nabokov-Sirin also
existed out there; that Bunin himself ‘was still alive and had been
writing for all these twenty years; that:journals of the arts were
being published; that theatrical works were being produced, that
Russians from the same areas‘of: Russia came together in groups
where their mother tongue could ‘be heard; and that émigré men
had not given up marrying émigré women, who in turn presented
them with children, which meant young: people our own age.

The picture of emigration presented in our country was so
falsified that if one had conducted a mass survey to ask which
side the Russian émigrés were on in the Spanish Civil War, or
else, perhaps, what side they were on in the Second World War,
with one voice everyone would have replied: For Franco! For
Hitler! Even now people in our country do not know that many
more White émigrés fought on the Republican side in Spain.
That both the Vlasov divisions and the Cossack corps of von
Pannwitz (the “Krasnov” corps) were made up of Soviet citizens
and not of émigrés. The émigrés did not support Hitler. They
ostracized Merezhkovsky and Gippius, who took Hitler’s part,
leaving them to alienated loneliness. There was a joke—except
it wasn’t a joke—to the effect that Denikin wanted to fight for
the Soviet Union against Hitler, and that at one time Stalin
planned to arrange his return to the Motherland, not for military
reasons, obviously, but as a symbol of national unity. During the
German occupation of France, a horde of Russian émigrés,
young. and old, joined the Resistance. And after the liberation
of Paris they swarmed to the Soviet Embassy to apply for per-
mission to return to the Motherland. No matter what kind of
Russia it was—it was still Russia! That was their slogan, and
that is how they proved they had not been lying previously about
their love for her. (Imprisoned in 1945 and 1946, they were
almost happy that these prison bars and these jailers were their
own, Russian. And they observed with surprise the Soviet boys
scratching their heads and saying: “Why the hell did we come
back? Wasn’t there room enough for us in Europe?”)

But, given that Stalinist logic which said that every Soviet
person who had lived abroad had to be imprisoned in camp, how
could the émigrés possibly. escape the same lot? In the Balkans,
Central Europe, Harbin, they were arrested: as soon as the Soviet

264 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

armies arrived. They were arrested in their apartments and on
the street, just like Soviet citizens. For a while State Security
arrested only men, and not all of them, only those who had in
one or another way revealed a political bias. Later on, their
families were transported to exile in Russia, but some were left
where they were in Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia. In France they
were welcomed into Soviet citizenship with honors and flowers
and sent back to the Motherland in comfort; and only when they
got to the U.S.S.R. were they raked in. Things dragged out
longer for the Shanghai émigrés. In 1945 Russian hands didn’t
reach that far. But a plenipotentiary from the Soviet government
went to Shanghai and announced a decree of the Presidium of
the Supreme Soviet extending forgiveness to all émigrés. Well,
now, how could one refuse to believe that? The government cer-
tainly couldn’t lie! Whether or not there actually was such a
decree, it did not, in any case, tie the hands of the Organs. The
Shanghai Russians expressed their delight. They were told they
could take with them as many possessions as they wanted and
whatever they wanted. They went home with automobiles—the
country could put them to good use. They were told they could
settle wherever they wanted to in the Soviet Union and, of
course, work at any profession or trade. They were transported
from Shanghai in steamships. The fate of the passengers varied.
On some of the ships, for some reason, they were given no food
at all. They also suffered various fates after reaching the port of —
Nakhodka (which was, incidentally, one of the main transit
centers of Gulag). Almost all of them were loaded into freight
cars, like prisoners, except that they had, as yet, no strict convoy,
and there were no police dogs. Some of them were actually de-
livered to inhabited places, to cities, and allowed to live there
for two or three years. Others were delivered in trainloads
straight to their camps and were dumped out somewhere off a
high embankment into the forest beyond the Volga, together
with their white pianos and their jardinieres. In 1948-1949, the
former Far Eastern émigrés who had until then managed to stay
out of camps were scraped up to the last man.

As a nine-year-old boy I had read the small dark-blue books
of V. V. Shulgin with more interest than I had read Jules Verne.
At that time they were sold openly in our book stalls. His was

That Spring | 265

a voice from a world that had disappeared with such finality
that not even the most extravagant fantasy could have projected
that invisible point in the soundless corridors of the Big Lub-
yanka where his steps would intersect my own before twenty years
had passed. True, I would not meet the man himself until an-
other twenty years had gone by. But I had time to study attentively
many émigrés, old and young, in the spring of 1945.

I underwent a medical examination with Captain Borshch and
Colonel Mariyushkin. And the pitiful sight of their naked,
wrinkled, dark-yellow bodies, not bodies any longer but mum-
mies, has always remained before my eyes. They were arrested
five minutes this side of the grave, so to speak, and brought to
Moscow from several thousand miles away, and there in Mos-
cow, in 1945, an interrogation was proceeding in the most
serious way on. . . their struggle against Soviet power in 1919!

We have become so used to the piling up of injustices during
interrogation and trial that we have ceased drawing any dis-
tinctions of degree between them. This captain and this colonel
were veteran officers of the Tsar’s Russian Army. They had both
been over forty, and they had both served in the army for
twenty years, when the telegraph brought them news that the
Tsar had been overthrown in Petrograd. For twenty years they
had served the Tsar according to their oath. And now, against
their wills—for all we know, possibly muttering “Beat it! Scram!”
to themselves—they swore loyalty to the Provisional Govern-
ment. After that, no one asked them to swear any more oaths
because the whole army fell apart. They didn’t like the new
scheme of things, wherein soldiers tore shoulder boards off offi-
cers and killed them, and it was natural for them to join other
officers to fight against it. And it was natural for the Red Army
to fight against them and push them into the sea. But in a coun-
try in which at least the rudiments of jurisprudence exist, what
basis was there for putting them on trial, and a quarter of a cen-
tury later at that? (They had lived as private persons all that
time . . . Mariyushkin up to the very moment of his arrest.
Borshch, to be sure, had turned up in a Cossack wagon train in
Austria, but in a transport, with the old men and women, not in
an armed unit.)

However, in 1945, in the very center of Soviet jurisdiction,

266 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

they were charged with: actions directed toward the overthrow
of the government of the workers’ and peasants’ soviets; armed
incursion into Soviet territory, in other words, not having im-
mediately left Russia when Petrograd was declared Soviet; aiding
the international bourgeoisie (which they had never seen even
in their dreams) ; serving counterrevolutionary governments (i.e.,
their own generals, to whom they had been subordinate all their
lives). And all these sections—Nos. 1, 2, 4, 13—of Article 58
were included in a Criminal Code adopted in 1926, that is, six
to seven years after the end of the Civil War. This was a classic
and unconscionable example of the ex post facto application of
a law! In addition, Article 2 of the Code specified that it applied
only to citizens taken into custody on the territory of the Russian
Republic. But State Security’s strong right arm had grabbed
people who were in no wise Soviet citizens from all the countries
of Europe and Asia.™* And we won't even bring up the question
of statutes of limitations. This question was provided for very
flexibly—no statutes of limitations applied to Article 58. (“Why
stir up the past indeed?” ) Such statutes are invoked only in the
case of our home-grown executioners, who have destroyed many,
many more of their compatriots than did the whole Civil War.

Mariyushkin, at least, remembered everything clearly. He told
us the details of being evacuated from Novorossisk. But Borshch
had already descended into second childhood and prattled on
and on about celebrating Easter in the Lubyanka: he had eaten
only half his bread ration during Palm Sunday week and Holy
Week and had set the rest of it aside, gradually replacing the
stale pieces with fresh ones. Thus he had accumulated seven full
rations when it came time to break the Lenten fast—and he had
“feasted” for the three days of Easter.

I do not know what kind of White Guards they were in the
Civil War, either of them, whether they were among the ex-
ceptional few who hung every tenth worker without trial and
whipped the peasants, or whether they were the other kind, the
soldierly majority. The fact that they were being interrogated
and sentenced in Moscow was no proof of anything nor a matter

14. On this basis no single African leader has any assurance that we will
not, ten years from now, promulgate a law in accordance with which we will

put him on trial for what he does today. Yes. The Chinese, in fact, will pro-
mulgate precisely such laws—just give them the chance to reach out that far.

That Spring | 267

of any consequence. But if, from that time on, they had lived
for a quarter of a century, not as retired officers, on pensions and
with honor, but as homeless exiles, then how could anyone point
to any moral basis for trying them? That is the kind of dialectic
Anatole France mastered, but which we cannot seem to grasp.
According to Anatole France, by the time it’s today, yesterday's
martyr is already in the wrong—in fact, from the first minute the
red shirt covered his body. And vice versa. But our version is:
If they rode me for one short year, when I had just outgrown
being a foal, then I am called a riding horse all my life, even
though I have long since been used only as a cab horse.

Colonel Konstantin Konstantinovich Yasevich was very dif-
ferent from these helpless émigré mummies. For him, clearly,
the end of the Civil War had not ended the struggle against
Bolshevism. As to how he continued to struggle—where and
with what—he did not enlighten me. But the sense that he was
still in the service remained with him in the cell itself. In the
midst of all the chaotic concepts, the blurred and broken lines of
vision, in most of our heads, he had, evidently, a clear and exact
view of everything around him; as a result of this reasoned point
of view on life, his body, too, exhibited a steady strength, re-
siliency, and activity. He was certainly not less than sixty. His
head was totally bald, without a single hair. He had already
survived his interrogation and was awaiting his sentence, like
the rest of us. He could expect no help from anywhere, of course.
But he kept his young, even rosy skin. Among all of us in the
cell, he alone did exercises every morning and washed himself at
the faucet. The rest of us were trying not to squander the calories
in Our prison ration. He put his time to use, and whenever an
aisle opened up between the rows of board bunks, he paced
those fifteen to twenty feet with a precise stride and a precise
profile, crossing his arms over his chest and staring through the
walls with clear young eyes.

And the difference between us and him was that we were all
astonished at what was happening to us, while nothing around
him contradicted his expectations, and precisely for that reason
he was absolutely alone in the cell.

A year later, I was able to appraise his conduct in prison.
Once again I was in the Butyrki, and in one of those seventy

268 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

cells I met some young codefendants of Yasevich who had al-
ready been sentenced to ten and fifteen years. The sentences
given everyone in their group were typed out on cigarette paper,
and for some reason they had it in their possession. Yasevich
was first on the list, and his sentence was: to be shot. So that was
what he saw—what he foresaw—through the wall with his still-
young eyes as he paced back and forth from the table to the
door! But his unimpaired consciousness of the correctness of his
path in life lent him extraordinary strength.

Among the émigrés was one my own age, Igor Tronko. We
became friends. Both of us were weak, dried out; our skin was
grayish-yellow on our bones. (Why had we collapsed to such an
extent? I think the main cause was spiritual confusion.) Both of
us were thin and on the tall side, and we were shaken by the
gusts of summer wind in the Butyrki courtyards. We always
walked side by side, with the careful steps of old men, and dis-
cussed the parallels in our lives. He had been born in South
Russia the same year as I. We were still nursing babes when
fate stuck her hand into her well-worn purse and drew out a
short straw for me and a long one for him. So it was that he
rolled off across the sea, even though his White Guard father
was just a rank-and-file, unpropertied telegrapher.

I found it interesting in the extreme to picture through his life
all those compatriots of my generation who had landed outside
Russia. They had grown up under good family supervision and
in very modest, even meager, circumstances. They were all very
well brought up and, within the range of existing possibilities,
well educated. They grew up without knowing fear or repression,
though the White organizations maintained a certain yoke of
authority over them until they themselves grew strong. They
grew up in such a way that the sins to which all European youth
was subject in that period—a high crime rate, a frivolous atti-
tude toward life, thoughtlessness, dissipation—did not touch
them. That was because they grew up, so to speak, in the
shadow of the indelible misfortune which had befallen their
families. Whatever country they grew up in, they looked on
Russia alone as their Motherland. Their spiritual upbringing was
based on Russian literature, all the more beloved because to
them it was the beginning and end of their Motherland, because

That Spring | 269

for them their Motherland did not exist as a primary geographi-
cal and physical fact. The contemporary printed word was much
more generally accessible to them than to us, but they received
Soviet books in conspicuously small quantities. And they felt
this lack all the more keenly; it seemed to them chiefly respon-
sible for their inability to understand what was most important,
highest, and most beautiful in Soviet Russia; and that the books
they did receive presented a distortion, a lie; were incomplete.
The picture they had of our real life was very, very faint, but
their longing for their Motherland was such that if we had called
on them in 1941 they would all have joined the Red Army, and
it would have been even sweeter for them to die than to survive.
These young people from twenty-five to twenty-seven already
represented and firmly defended several points of view, in defi-
nite conflict with the opinions of the old generals and political
leaders. Thus Igor’s group was called the “nepredreshentsy”—
the “non-prejudgers”: they declared that anyone who had not
shared with the Motherland the whole, complex burden of the
past decades had no right to decide anything about the future of
Russia, nor even to presuppose anything, but should simply go
and lend his strength to whatever the people might decide.

We would often lie beside one another on the wooden bunks.
I tried to understand his world as best I could, and our encounter
revealed to me a concept confirmed by later encounters—that
the outflow from Russia of a significant part of her spiritual
forces, which occurred in the Civil War, had deprived us of a
great and important stream of Russian culture. Everyone who
really loves that culture will strive for the reunion of both
streams, the one at home and the tributary abroad. Only then
will our culture attain wholeness. Only then will it reveal its
capacity for benign development.

And I dream of living until that day.

A human being is weak, weak. In the end, that spring, even the
most stubborn of us wanted forgiveness and were ready to give
up a lot for just a little bit more life. An anecdote was current
among us: “What is your last word, accused?” “I beg you to

270 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

send me wherever you please, just as long as it is under the
Soviet government and the sun is there!” No one was threatening
to deprive us of the Soviet government, of course: just of the sun.
No one wanted to be sent beyond the Arctic Circle, to scurvy
and malnutrition. For some reason, a legend about the Altai
region in particular flourished in the cells. Those rare persons
who had been there at one time or another, but especially those
who had never been there, wove melodious dreams about the
wonderful country of the Altai for their cellmates! It had the
vast expanses of Siberia and a mild climate. Rivers of honey
flowing between banks of wheat. The steppe and mountains.
- Herds of sheep, flocks of wildfowl, shoals of fish. Populous, rich
villages.*®

Oh, if only we could find a hiding place in that quiet! If only
we could listen to the pure resounding of the cock crow in the
unpolluted air! Or stroke the good, serious face of a horse!
Curses on you, all you great problems! Let someone else beat
his head against you, someone more stupid. Oh, just to rest there
from the interrogator’s mother oaths and the monotonous un-
winding of your whole life, from the crash of the prison locks,
from the suffocating stuffiness of the cell. Only one life is allotted
us, one small, short life! And we had been criminal enough to
push ours in front of somebody’s machine guns, or drag it with
us, still unsullied, into the dirty rubbish heap of politics. There,
in the Altai, it appeared, one could live in the lowest, darkest
hut on the edge of the village, next to the forest. And one could
go into the woods, not for brushwood and not for mushrooms,
but just to go, for no reason, and hug two tree trunks: Dear ones,
you're all I need.

And the spring itself sounded a summons to mercy. It was the
spring that marked the ending of such an enormous war! We saw
that millions of us prisoners were flowing past and knew that
millions more would greet us in the camps. It just couldn’t be
that so many people were to remain in prison after the greatest

15. Does not the prisoner’s dream of the Altai simply continue the old
peasant dream about it? The so-called lands of His Majesty’s Cabinet were in
the Altai, and because of this the area was closed to colonization much longer
than the rest of Siberia. But it was there that the peasants wanted most of all
to settle—and where they actually settled. Is it not from this that the enduring
legend has arisen?

That Spring | 271

victory in the world! It was just to frighten us that they were
holding us for the time being: so that we might remember and
take heed. Of course, there would soon be a total amnesty and
all of us would be released. Someone even swore that he had
read in a newspaper that Stalin, replying to some American
correspondent (whose name I cannot remember), said that after
the war there would be an amnesty the like of which the world
had never seen. And one of the interrogators had actually said
to someone else that there would soon be a general amnesty.
(These rumors were a help to the interrogators. because they
weakened ‘the prisoners’ will: The hell with him, let’s sign—it
isn’t going to be for long anyway.).

But . . . for mercy one must have wisdom. This has been a truth
throughout our history and will remain one for a long time to
come. :

We did not heed the few sober minds among us who croaked
out that never, in a whole quarter-century, had there been an
amnesty for political prisoners—and that there never would be
one. Some cell expert among the stool pigeons leaped up with an
answer: “Yes, there was! In 1927. For the tenth anniversary of
the Revolution. All the prisons were emptied, and white flags
were flown. on all of them.” This astonishing vision of white
flags on the prisons—why white?—-was particularly striking.’
We brushed aside those wise individuals among us who explained
that millions of us were imprisoned precisely because the war had
ended. We were no longer needed at the front. We were danger-
ous in the rear. And, were it not for us, not one brick would ever
get laid at the remote construction projects. We were too self-
absorbed even to grasp Stalin’s simple economic calculations—
let alone his malice. Just who this year, after being demobilized,
would want to leave his family and home and go off to the
Kolyma, to Vorkuta, to Siberia, where there were neither roads

16. Vyshinsky, Ot Tyurem k Vospitatelnym Uchrezhdeniyam, p. 396,
presents the figures. In the 1927 amnesty, 7.3 percent of the prisoners were
amnestied. This is a credible figure. Pretty poor for a tenth anniversary.
Among the political prisoners, women with children were freed and those who
had only a few months left to serve. In the Verkhne-Uralsk Prison Isolator,
for example, twelve out of the two hundred prisoners there were released.
But, in the middle of it, they regretted even this wretched amnesty and began `
to block it: they delayed some releases, and some people who were freed were
given a “minus” restriction instead of full freedom to go where they pleased.

272 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

nor houses? It was virtually the job of the State Planning Com-
mission to assign to the MVD the number of workers required
for plan fulfillment and thus the number to be arrested. An
amnesty, a broad and generous amnesty, was what we waited
for and thirsted for! Somebody said that in England prisoners were
amnestied on the anniversary of the coronation, in other words,
every year. Many politicals had been amnestied on the three
hundredth anniversary of the Romanovs, in 1912. Could it really
be possible that now, after we had won a victory which would
resound throughout our entire era and even longer, the Stalin
government would be petty and vengeful and would hang onto
its resentment of every stumble and slip of each of its minuscule
subjects?

There is a simple truth which one can learn only through suffer-
ing: in war not victories are blessed but defeats. Governments
need victories and the people need defeats. Victory gives rise to
the desire for more victories. But after a defeat it is freedom that
men desire—and usually attain. A people needs defeat just as an
individual needs suffering and misfortune: they compel the
deepening of the inner life and generate a spiritual upsurge.

The Poltava victory was a great misfortune for Russia: it
resulted in two centuries of great strain and stress, ruin, the ab-
sence of freedom—and war and war again. The Poltava victory
spelled salvation for the Swedes. Having lost the appetite for war,
the Swedes became the most prosperous and the freest people in
Europe."

We are so used to taking pride in our victory over Napoleon
that we leave out of account the fact that because of it the eman-
cipation of the serfs did not take place a half-century sooner.
Because of it, the strengthened monarchy destroyed the Decem-
brists. (The French occupation was never a reality for Russia.)
But the Crimean War, and the Japanese War, and our war with
Germany in the First World War—all those defeats brought us
freedom and revolution.

We believed in amnesty that spring, we weren’t being at all
original in this. Talking with old prisoners, one gradually dis-
covers that this thirst for mercy and this faith in mercy is never
absent within gray prison walls. For decades and decades, wave

17. Perhaps, only in the twentieth century, if one is to believe the stories
one hears, has their stagnating well-being led to moral indigestion.

That Spring | 273

after wave of prisoners has thirsted for and believed in either an
amnesty, or a new Code, or a general review of cases. And the
rumors about these things have always been supported by the
Organs with skilled caution. The prisoner’s imagination sees
the ardently awaited arrival of the angel of liberation in just about
anything: the next anniversary of the October Revolution, Len-
in’s anniversaries, Victory Day, Red Army Day, Paris Commune
Day, every new session of the All-Russian Central Executive
Committee—the WTsIK—the end of every Five-Year Plan,
every Plenary Session of the Supreme Court! And the wilder the
arrests, the more Homeric and mind-boggling the scale of the
waves of prisoners, the more they inspired not sober-mindedness
but faith in amnesty!

All sources of light can to some degree be compared with the
Sun. And the Sun cannot be compared with anything. So it is
that all the expectations in the world can be compared with the
expectation of amnesty, but the expectation of amnesty cannot
be compared with anything else.

In the spring of 1945, every newcomer to the cell was asked
first of all what he had heard about an amnesty. And if two or
three prisoners were taken from their cells with their things, the
cell experts immediately compared cases and drew the conclusion
that theirs were the least serious cases and they had clearly been
taken out to be released. It had begun! In the toilet and in the
baths—the prisoners’ post offices—our “activists” looked every-
where for signs and graffiti about the amnesty. And one day at the
beginning of July, in the famous lavender vestibule of the Butyrki
baths, we read the enormous prophecy written in soap on a glazed
lavender slab far higher than a man’s head—which meant that
one man had stood on another’s shoulders in order to write it in
a place where it would take longer to erase:

“Hurrah!! Amnesty on July 17!"

What a celebration went on! (“After all, if they hadn’t known
for sure, they wouldn’t have written it!”) Everything that beat,
pulsed, circulated in the body came to a stop beneath the wave of
happiness, the expectation that the doors were about to swing
open.

But . . . for mercy one must have wisdom.

18. Indeed, the bastards were wrong by only one digit! For more details on
the great Stalin amnesty of July 7, 1945, see Part III, Chapter 6.

274 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

In the middle of July, the corridor jailer sent one old man from
our cell to wash down the toilet, and while. they were there eye to
eye—for he wouldn’t have dared in the presence of witnesses—
he looked sympathetically at the prisoner’s gray head and asked:
“What's your article, father?” “Fifty-eight!” The old man lit up.
At home three generations were mourning his arrest. “You're not
included,” sighed the jailer. Nonsense, we decided. in the cell:
just an illiterate jailer.

There was also a young man from Kiev in the cell, Valentin.
I can’t remember his family name. He had big eyes that were
beautiful in a feminine way, and he was terrified by the interroga-
tion. There is no doubt that he had the gift of precognition—-per-
haps only in his then current state of excitement. More than once,
he went around the cell in the morning and pointed: Today they
are going to come for you and you. I saw it in my dream. And
they came and got them .. . the very individuals he had pointed
out. One might add that a prisoner’s. heart is so inclined toward
mysticism that he accepts. precognition almost without surprise.

On July 27 Valentin came up to me: “Aleksandr! Today it is
our turn.” And he told me a dream that had all the characteristics
of prison dreams: a bridge across a muddy stream, a cross. I
began to get my things together. And it was not for nothing
either. He and I were summoned after morning tea. Our cellmates
saw us off with noisy good wishes, and many of them assured us
we were going off to freedom. They had figured it out by compar-
ing our less serious cases.

Perhaps you honestly don’t believe it. Perhaps you won’t allow
yourself to believe. You can try to brush it aside with jokes. But
flaming pincers, hotter than anything else on earth, suddenly close
around your heart. They just do. Suppose it’s true?

They assembled twenty of us from various cells and took us to
the baths first. Before every big change in his life, the prisoner
has first of all to take a bath. We had time enough there, an hour
and a half, to exchange our hunches and ideas. At that point, all
steamed up, our skins tender, we were taken through the little
emerald park in the Butyrki’s interior courtyard, where the birds
sang deafeningly, although they were probably only sparrows,
and the green of the trees seemed unbearably bright to eyes no
longer used to it. Never had my eyes seen the green of the leaves

That Spring | 275

with such intensity as they did that spring! And never in my life
had I seen anything closer to God’s paradise than that little
Butyrki park, which never took more than thirty seconds to
cross on the asphalt path.”

They took us to the Butyrki station—a very well-chosen nick-
name for that reception and dispatch point, especially because its
main hall was really like a good railroad station. They pushed
us into a large, spacious box. It was half-dark inside and the air
was clean and fresh, since its one and only little window was very
high up and had no “muzzle.” And it opened on that same sunny
little park, and through the transom the birds’ twitter deafened
us, and in the opening a little bright-green twig hung, promising
us all freedom and home. (We had never been imprisoned in such
a good box—and that couldn’t be a matter of chance! )

And we were all cases for the OSO’s—the Special Boards at-
tached to the GPU-NKVD. And it turned out that each of us had
been imprisoned for nothing much.

No one touched us for three hours. No one opened the doors.
We paced up and down the box and, finally, tired out, we sat
down on the slab benches. And the little twig kept bobbing and
bobbing outside the opening, and the sparrows screamed as if
they were possessed.

Suddenly the door crashed open, and one of us was summoned,
a quiet bookkeeper, thirty-five years old. He went out. The door
was locked. We started running about our box even more agi-
tatedly than before. We were on hot coals.

Once more the crash of the door. They called another one
out and readmitted the first. We rushed to him. But he was not
the same man! The life had gone out of his face. His wide-open
eyes were unseeing. His movements were uncertain as he stum-
bled across the smooth floor of the box. Was he in a state of
shock? Had they swatted him with an ironing board?

“Well? Well?” we asked him, with sinking hearts. (If he had
not in fact just gotten up from the electric chair, he must at the

19. Many years later, this time as a tourist, I saw another, similar park,
except that it was even smaller, in the Trubetskoi bastion of the Peter and
Paul Fortress in Leningrad. The other tourists exclaimed over the darkness of
the corridors and cells, but I kept thinking to myself that with such a park to
walk in, the prisoners of the Trubetskoi bastion were not lost men. We were
taken out to walk only in deathly cell-like stone enclosures.

276 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

very least have been given a death sentence.) And in the voice of
one reporting the end of the universe, the bookkeeper managed to
blurt out:

“Five ... years!”

And once more the door crashed. That was how quickly they
returned, as if they were only being taken to the toilet to urinate.
The second man returned, all aglow. Evidently he was being re-
leased.

“Well, well, come on?” We swarmed around him, our hopes
rising again. He waved his hand, choking with laughter.

“Fifteen years!”

It was just too absurd to be believed.

Chapter 7

In the Engine Room

The box adjacent to the so-called Butyrki “station” was the
famous frisking box, where new arrivals were searched. It had
space enough for five or six jailers to process up to twenty zeks
in one batch. Now, however, it was empty and the rough-hewn
search tables had nothing on them. Over at one side of the room,
seated behind a small nondescript table beneath a small lamp,
was a neat, black-haired NKVD major. Patient boredom was
what his face chiefly revealed. The intervals during which the zeks
were brought in and led out one by one were a waste of his time.
Their signatures could have been collected much, much faster.

He indicated that I was to sit down on the stool opposite him,
on the other side of his table. He asked my name. To the right and
left of the inkwell lay two piles of white papers the size of a half-
sheet of typewriter paper, all looking much the same. In format
they were just like the fuel requisitions handed out in apartment-
house management offices, or warrants in official institutions for
purchase of office supplies. Leafing through the pile on the right,
the major found the paper which referred to me. He pulled it out
and read it aloud to me in a bored patter. (I understood I had
been sentenced to eight years.) Immediately, he began to write a
statement on the back of it, with a fountain pen, to the effect that
the text had been read to me on the particular date.

My heart didn’t give an extra half-beat—it was all so everyday
and routine. Could this really be my sentence—the turning point

277

278 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

in my life? I would have liked to feel nervous, to experience this
moment to the full, but I just couldn’t. And the major had al-
ready pushed the sheet over to me, the blank side facing up.
And a schoolchild’s seven-kopeck pen, with a bad point that had
lint on it from the inkwell, lay there in front of me.

“No, I have to read it myself.”

“Do you really think I would deceive you?” the major objected
lazily. “Well, go ahead, read it.”

Unwillingly, he let the paper out of his hand. I turned it over
and began to look through it with deliberate slowness, not just
word by word but letter by letter. It had been typed, but what I
had in front of me was not the original but a carbon:

EXTRACT
from a decree of the OSO of the NK VD of the U.S.S.R.
of July 7, 1945,! No. :

All of this was underscored with a dotted line and the sheet was
vertically divided with a dotted line:

Case heard: . Decreed:
Accusation of so-and-so |. ‘To designate for so-and-so (name)
(name, year of birth, . for anti-Soviet propaganda, and for
place of birth) . an attempt to create an anti-Soviet

organization, 8 (eight) years in
corrective labor camps.

Copy verified. Secretary

Was I really just supposed to sign and leave in silence? I looked
at the major—to see whether he intended to say something to me,
whether he might not provide some clarification. No, he had no
such intention. He had already nodded to the jailer at the door to
get the next prisoner ready.

To give the moment at least a little importance, I asked him,
with a tragic expression: “But, really, this is terrible! Eight years!
What for?”

And I could hear how false my own words sounded. Neither he
nor I detected anything terrible.

“Right there.” The major showed me once again where to sign.

I signed. I could simply not think of anything else to do.

1. They had met to sentence me on the very day of the amnesty. The work
must go on....

In the Engine Room | 279

“In that case, allow me to write an appeal right here. After all,
the sentence is unjust.”

“As provided by regulations,” the major assented with a nod,
placing my sheet of paper on the left-hand pile.

“Let’s move along,” commanded the jailer.

And I moved along.

(I had not really shown much initiative. Georgi Tenno, who,
to be sure, had been handed a paper worth twenty-five years,
answered: “After all, this is a life sentence. In olden times they
used to beat the drums and assemble a crowd when a person was
given a life sentence. And here it’s like being on a list for a soap
ration—twenty-five years and run along!”

Arnold Rappoport took the pen and wrote on the back of the
verdict: “I protest categorically this terroristic, illegal sentence
and demand immediate release.” The officer who had handed it
to him had at first waited patiently, but when he read what Rap-
poport had written, he was enraged and tore up the paper with the
note on it. So what! The term remained in force anyway. This was
just a copy.

Vera Korneyeva was expecting fifteen years and she saw with
delight that there was a typo on the official sheet—it read only
five. She laughed her luminous laugh and hurried to sign before
they took it back. The officer looked at her dubiously: “Do you
really understand what I read to you?” “Yes, yes, thank you
very much. Five years in corrective-labor camps.”

The ten-year sentence of Janos Rozsas, a Hungarian, was read
to him in the corridor in Russian, without any translation. He
signed it, not knowing it was his sentence, and he waited a long
time afterward for his trial. Still later, when he was in camp, he
recalled the incident very vaguely and realized what had hap-
pened.)

I returned to the box with a smile. It was strange. Each minute
I became jollier and more relieved. Everyone was returning with
“ten-ruble bills,” including Valentin. The lightest term in our
group that day had been given the bookkeeper who had gone out
of his mind. He was still, in fact, beside himself. And the lightest
term after his was mine.

In the splashes of sun and the July breeze, the little twig out-
side the window continued to bob up and down as gaily as before.
We chattered boisterously. Here and there, more and more fre-

280 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

quently, laughter resounded in the box. We were laughing be-
cause everything had gone off so smoothly. We were laughing
at the shocked bookkeeper. We were laughing at our morning
hopes and at the way our cellmates had seen us off and arranged
secret signals with us to be transmitted via food parcels—four
potatoes or two bagels!

“Well, anyway, there is going to be an amnesty!” several af-
firmed. “All this is just for form’s sake and it doesn’t mean any-
thing. They want to give us a good scare so we'll keep in line.
Stalin told an American correspondent—

“What was his name?”

“I don’t remember his name.”

So they ordered us to take our things, formed us up by twos,
and led us once again through that same marvelous little park
filled with summer. And where did they take us? Once again to
the baths.

And, oh, what a peal of laughter that got! My God, what silly
nincompoops! Still roaring, we undressed, hung our duds on the
same trolley hooks and rolled them into the same roaster they’d
already been rolled into that very morning. Roaring, each of us
took a small sliver of repulsive soap and went into the spacious,
resonant shower room to wash off our girlish gaiety. We splashed
about in there, pouring hot clean water on ourselves, and we got
to romping about as if we were school kids who had come to the
baths after their last exam. This cleansing, relieving laughter
was, I think, not really sick but a living defense for the salvation
of the organism.

As we dried ourselves off, Valentin said to me, reassuringly,
intimately: “Well, all right. We are still young. We are going to
live a long time yet. The main thing is not to make a misstep now.
We are going to a camp—and we'll not say one word to anyone,
so they won’t plaster new terms on us. We will work honestly—
and keep our mouths shut.”

And he really believed in his program, that naive little kernel
of grain caught between Stalin’s millstones! He really had his
hopes set on it. One wanted to agree with him, to serve out the
term cozily, and then expunge from one’s head what one had
lived through.

But I had begun to sense a truth inside myself: if in order to
live it is necessary not to live, then what’s it all for?

In the Engine Room | 281

One cannot really say that the OSO had been conceived after the
Revolution. Catherine the Great had sentenced the journalist
Novikov, whom she disliked, to fifteen years on, one might say,
an OSO basis, since she didn’t turn him over to a court. And all
the Tsars. once in a. while, in a fatherly way, exiled without any
trial those who had incurred their displeasure. In the 1860's, a
basic court reform took place. It seemed as if rulers and subjects
had both begun to develop something like a juridical view of
society. And yet in the seventies and eighties Korolenko tracked
down cases where administrative repression had usurped the role:
of judicial judgment. In 1872, he himself and two other students
were exiled without trial, on the orders of the Deputy Minister of
State Properties—a typical case of an OSO. Another time, he and
his brother were exiled without trial to Glazov. Korolenko has
also given us the name of one Fyodor Bogdan, an emissary from
the peasants—a khodok—who got right up to the Tsar himself
and was then exiled. And of Pyankov, too, who was acquitted
by a court and yet exiled by order of the Tsar. And there were
several others as well. And Vera Zasulich explained in a letter
sent after she emigrated that she had not run away from the
court and a trial but from nonjudicial administrative repres-
sion.

Thus the tradition of the “dotted line’—the administratively
issued sentence—dragged on. But it was too lax; it was suitable
for a drowsy Asiatic country, but not for a country that was
rapidly advancing. ... . Moreover, it lacked any definite identity:
who was the OSO? Sometimes it was the Tsar, sometimes the
governor, sometimes the deputy minister. And if it was still
possible to enumerate names and cases, this was not, begging
your pardon, real scope.

Real scope entered the picture with the twenties, when per-
manently operating Troikas—panels of three, operating behind
closed doors—were created to bypass the courts permanently.
In the beginning they even flaunted it proudly—the Troika of the
GPU. Not only did they not conceal the names of the members;
they publicized them. Who on the Solovetsky Islands did not
know the names of the famous Moscow Troika—Gleb Boky,

282 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

Vul, and Vasilyev? Yes, and what a word it was, in fact—
troika! It bore a slight hint of sleigh bells on the shaft bow; the
celebration of Shrovetide; and, interwoven with all this, a
mystery. Why “troika”? What did it mean? After all, a court
wasn’t a quartet either! And a Troika wasn’t a court! And the
biggest mystery of all lay in the fact that it was kept out of sight.
We hadn’t been there. We hadn’t seen it. All we got was a piece
of paper. Sign here! The Troika was even more frightening than
a Revolutionary Tribunal. It set itself even farther apart, muffled
itself up, locked itself in a separate room, and—soon—concealed
the names of its members. Thus we grew used to the idea that the
Troika members didn’t eat or drink or move about among
ordinary people. Once they had isolated themselves in order to
go into session, they were shut off for good, and all we knew of
them were the sentences handed out through typists. (And they
had to be returned too. Such documents couldn’t be left in the
hands of individuals! )

These Troikas (we use the plural just in case, because—as
with a deity—we never know where or in what form it exists)
satisfied a persistent need that had arisen: never to allow those
arrested to return to freedom (This was like an OTK—a De-
partment for Quality Control in industry—but in this case it was
attached to the GPU—to prevent any spoiled goods.) If it turned
out that someone was innocent and could therefore not be tried
at all, then let him have his “minus 32” via the Troika—which
meant he couldn’t live in any of the provincial capitals—or let
him spend two or three years in exile, after which he would have
a convict’s clipped ear, would always be a marked man, and, from
then on, a recidivist.

(Please forgive us, reader. We have once more gone astray with
this rightist opportunism—this concept of “guilt,” and of the
guilty or innocent. It has, after all, been explained to us that the
heart of the matter is not personal guilt, but social danger. One
can imprison an innocent person if he is socially hostile. And one
can release a guilty man if he is socially friendly. But lacking legal
training, we can be forgiven, for the 1926 Code, according to
which, my good fellow, we lived for twenty-five years and more,
was itself criticized for an “impermissible bourgeois approach,”
for an “insufficiently class-conscious approach,” and for some .

In the Engine Room | 283

kind of “bourgeois weighing of punishments in relation to the
gravity of what had been committed.” )?

Alas, it is not for us to write the absorbing history of this
particular Organ: how the Troikas turned into OSO’s; or when
they got renamed; or whether there were OSO’s in provincial cen-
ters, or just one of them in the Great Palace; or which of our
great and proud leaders were members; or how often they met and
how long their sessions lasted; whether or not they were served
tea while they worked, and if they were, what was served with
the tea; and how the work itself proceeded—did they converse
while it was going on or not? We are not the ones who will write
this history—because we don’t know. All that we have heard
is that the essence of the OSO was triune. And even though it is
still impossible to name its industrious members, yet we do know
the three organs permanently represented there: one member
represented the Central Committee of the Party, one the MVD,
and one the Chief Prosecutor’s office. However, it would not be
a miracle if we should learn someday that there were never any
sessions, and that there was only a staff of experienced typists
composing extracts from nonexistent records of proceedings, and
one general administrator who directed the typists. As for typists,
there were certainly typists. That we can guarantee.

Up to 1924, the authority of the Troika was limited to sen-
tences of three years, maximum. From 1924 on, they moved up
to five years of camp; from 1937 on, the OSO could turn out “ten-
ruble bills”; after 1948, they could rivet a “quarter”—twenty-
five years—on you. And there are people—Chavdarov, for
example—who know that during the war years the OSO even
sentenced prisoners to execution by shooting. Nothing unusual
about this.

The OSO was nowhere mentioned in either the Constitution
or the Code. However, it turned out to be the most convenient
kind of hamburger machine—easy to operate, undemanding, and
requiring no legal lubrication. The Code existed on its own, and
the OSO existed on its own, and it kept on deftly grinding without
all the Code’s 205 articles, neither invoking them nor even men-
tioning them.

2. Vyshinsky, Ot Tyurem k Vospitatelnym Uchrezhdeniyam.

284 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

As they used to joke in camp: “There is no court for nothing
—for that there is an OSO.”

Of course, the OSO itself also needed for convenience some
kind of operational shorthand, but for that purpose it worked
out on its own a dozen “letter” articles which made operations
very much simpler. It wasn’t necessary, when they were used, to
cudgel your brains trying to make things fit the formulations of
the Code. And they were few enough to be easily remembered by
a child. Some of them we have already described:

ASA —Anti-Soviet Agitation

KRD —cCounter-Revolutionary Activity

KRTD—Counter-Revolutionary Trotskyite Activity (And that
“T” made the life of a zek in camp much harder.)

PSh —Suspicion of Espionage (Espionage that went beyond
the bounds of suspicion was handed over to a tri-
bunal.)

SVPSh—Contacts Leading (!) to Suspicion of Espionage

KRM —Counter-Revolutionary Thought

VAS —Dissemination of Anti-Soviet Sentiments

SOE —Socially Dangerous Element

SVE —Socially Harmful Element

PD —Criminal Activity (a favorite accusation against
former camp inmates if there was nothing else to be
used against them )

And then, finally, there was the very expansive category:

ChS —Member of a Family (of a person convicted under
one of the foregoing “letter” categories)

It has to be remembered that these categories were not applied
uniformly and equally among different groups and in different
years. But, as with the articles of the Code and the sections in
special decrees, they broke out in sudden epidemics.

There is one more qualification. The OSO did not claim to be
handing down a sentence. It did not sentence a person but, in-
stead, imposed an administrative penalty. And that was the whole
thing in a nutshell. Therefore it was, of course, natural for it to
have juridical independence!

But even though they did not claim that the administrative

In the Engine Room | 285

penalty was a court sentence, it could be up to twenty-five years
and include:

e Deprivation of titles, ranks, and decorations
e Confiscation of all property

e Imprisonment

e Deprivation of the right to correspond

Thus a person could disappear from the face of the earth with
the help of the OSO even more reliably than under the terms
of some primitive court sentence.

The OSO enjoyed another important advantage in that its
penalty could not be appealed. There was nowhere to appeal to.
There was no appeals jurisdiction above it, and no jurisdiction
beneath it. It was subordinate only to the Minister of Internal
Affairs, to Stalin, and to Satan.

Another big advantage the OSO had was speed. This speed
was limited only by the technology of typewriting.

And, last but not least, not only did the OSO not have to con-
front the accused face to face, which lessened the burden on inter-
prison transport: it didn’t even have to have his photograph. At
a time when the prisons were badly overcrowded, this was a great
additional advantage because the prisoner did not have to take
up space on the prison floor, or eat free bread once his interroga-
tion had been completed. He could be sent off to camp imme-
diately and put to honest work. The copy of the sentence could be
read to him much later.

It used to be that in favorable conditions the prisoners were
unloaded from freight cars at their destinations. And they were
made to kneel down right there, next to the tracks—as a pre-
caution against attempted escape. But it looked as if they were
praying to the OSO. And then and there their sentences were
read out to them. It could also happen differently. In 1938
those who arrived at Perebory on prisoner transports did not
know either their Code articles or their sentences, but the clerk
who met them knew, and he looked them up on the list: SVE—
Socially Harmful Element—five years. That was during the time
when there was an urgent need for many hands to work on the
Moscow-Volga Canal.

286 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

Others worked in the camps for months without knowing their
sentences. After this, as I. Dobryak reported, they were solemnly
lined up—and not just on any old day, but on May 1, 1938, when
the red flags were flying—and the Stalino Province Troika’s sen-
tences were announced. (This would indicate that the OSO did
get decentralized in times of heavy load.) These sentences were
from ten to twenty years apiece. And in that same year, my former
camp foreman, Sinebryukhov, was sent off with a whole train-
load of unsentenced prisoners from Chelyabinsk to Cherepovets.
Months passed and the zeks worked away. And then one rest day
in winter (Note the days? Another advantage of the OSO), when
the frost was cracking, they were driven out into the courtyard
and lined up. A newly arrived lieutenant appeared and introduced
himself as having come to inform them of their OSO penalties.
But he turned out to be a decent sort because he squinted at
their thin footwear and at the sun’s rays in the steaming frost and
said:

“Well anyway, men, why should you freeze out here? The OSO
gave you all ten years apiece. There are just a very, very few who
got eight. You understand? Disssperse!”

But in view of the frankly mechanical operation of the Special
Board, why have any courts at all? Why use a horsecar when
there’s a noiseless modern streetcar available, which no one can
jump out of? Is it a matter of keeping the judges well fed?

Still, it is really quite indecent for a democratic state not to
have courts. In 1919, the Eighth Congress of the Party proclaimed
in its program: Efforts must be made to involve all the working
population in the exercise of judicial duties. It did not prove
possible to involve “all” the working population. Conducting a
trial is a delicate business. But there was no question of getting
along entirely without courts.

However, our political courts—the special collegia of provincial
courts, the military tribunals (and why, actually, should there be
military tribunals in peacetime anyway?), and all the supreme
courts too—unanimously followed the path of the OSO. They,
too, did not get stuck in the mud of public trials or in arguments
between sides.

In the Engine Room | 287

Their primary and principal distinguishing feature was closed
doors. They were first of all closed courts—for their own con-
venience.

And by now we have become so accustomed to the fact that
millions and millions of people were tried in closed sessions and
have become used to this for so long that now and then some
mixed-up son, brother, or nephew of a prisoner will even snort at
you with conviction: “And what would you have wanted?.. .
There’s information here. Our enemies will find out! You can’t
do it!”

Thus the fear that our “enemies will find out” makes us clamp
our head between our own knees. Who in our Fatherland, except
some bookworms, remembers now that Karakozov, who fired at
the Tsar, was provided with a defense lawyer? Or that Zhelyabov
and all the Narodnaya Volya group were tried in public, without
any fear that the “Turks would find out”? Or that Vera Zasulich,
who attempted to kill the official who was, translated into Soviet
terms, the Chief of the Moscow Administration of the MVD—
although she missed, and the bullet went past his head—not only
was not destroyed in a torture chamber but was acquitted in
open court by a jury—no Troika—and then went off in triumph
in a carriage?

Despite these comparisons, I do not at all mean to say that a
perfect system of courts and justice ever existed in Russia. In all
probability, an excellent judicial system is the last fruit of the most
mature society, or else one needs a Solomon. Vladimir Dal notes
that in the period before the emancipation of the serfs Russia had
“not one single proverb containing any praise of the courts.” And
that really means something. It seems likely that they never had
time to get around to making up a proverb praising the zemstvo
chiefs either. But, nevertheless, the judicial reform of 1864 at
least set the urban sector of our society on the road toward those
English models which Herzen praised so highly.

Saying all this, I still have not forgotten what Dostoyevsky had
to say in his Diary of a Writer against our trials by jury: about the
excesses of some lawyers’ eloquence (“Gentlemen of the jury!
What kind of woman would she have been if she had not stabbed
her rival? Gentlemen of the jury! Who among you would not have
thrown the child out of the window?”); and the risk that a juror’s
momentary impulse might outweigh his civic responsibility. But

288 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

spiritually Dostoyevsky far outstripped the realities of our life,
and he worried about what he shouldn’t have worried about! He
believed that we had achieved open trials once and for all! (In- |
deed, who among his contemporaries could have believed in the
OSO?) And somewhere else he writes: “It is better to err on the
side of mercy than on that of the death penalty.” Oh, yes, yes,
es!

f Excesses of eloquence do not afflict exclusively a judicial sys-
tem in process of being established; even more conspicuously,
they afflict an already established democracy that has not yet dis-
covered its moral goals. England again gives us examples, as
when, for partisan advantage, the leader of the opposition does
not hesitate to blame the government for a national predicament
worse than actually exists.

Excesses of eloquence are a malady. But what word can we
then use for the excessive use of closed doors? Dostoyevsky

dreamed of a court in which everything essential to the defense
- Of the accused would be set forth by the prosecutor. How many
aeons will we have to wait for that? Our social experience has so
far enriched us immeasurably with defense lawyers who accuse
the defendant. (“As an honest Soviet person, as a true patriot,
I cannot but feel repugnance at the disclosure of these evil
deeds.”)

And how comfortable it all is for the judges in a closed session!
Judicial robes are not required and one can even roll up one’s
sleeves. How easy it is to work! There are no public-address sys-
tems, no newspapermen, and no public. (Well, there is a public,
an audience, but it consists of interrogators. For example, they
used to attend the Leningrad Province Court during the day to
find out how their “protégés” were conducting themselves, and
at night went calling on those prisoners who needed to have their
consciences appealed to.)*®

The second main characteristic of our political courts is the
lack of ambiguity in their work, which is to say predetermined
verdicts.* In other words, you, a judge, always know what the

3. Ch n’s group.

4. That same collection edited by A. Y. Vyshinsky, Ot Tyurem k Vospita-
telnym Uchrezhdeniyam, includes materials indicating that the predetermination
of verdicts is an old, old story. In 1924-1929, sentences were determined by
joint administrative and economic considerations, Beginning in 1924, because of

In the Engine Room | 289

higher-ups expect of you (furthermore there’s a telephone if you
still have any doubts). And, following the example of the OSO’s,
sentences might even be typed out ahead of time, with only the
prisoner’s name to be added later, by hand. And in 1942 Stra-
khovich cried out during a session of the military tribunal of the
Leningrad Military District: “But I could not have been recruited
by Ignatovsky when I was only ten years old!” But the presiding
judge barked back: “Don’t slander the Soviet intelligence serv-
ice!” The whole thing had been predetermined long before: each
and every one of the Ignatovsky group was to be sentenced to be
shot. Some man named Lipov got included in the group, but no
one from the group knew him and he knew none of them either.
Well, so, all right, Lipov got ten years.

How hugely the predetermination of sentences contributed to
easing the thorny life of a judge. It wasn’t so much a mental relief,
in the sense that one didn’t have to think, as it was a moral relief.
You didn’t have to torture yourself with worry that you might
make a mistake in a sentence and make orphans out of your own
little children. And the predetermination of sentences could dis-
pose even so immovable a judge as Ulrikh to good humor. (And
what major execution had he not pronounced?) In 1945, the Mili-
tary Collegium was hearing the case of the “Estonian separatists.”
Short, stocky, good-humored Ulrikh was presiding. He didn’t pass
up a single opportunity to joke not only with his colleagues but
also with the prisoners. (After all, that’s what humaneness is! A
new trait—where had it ever been seen?) Having learned that
Susi was a lawyer, he said to him with a smile: “Well, so now
your profession can be of some use to you!” Well, there is no need
to quarrel. Why be embittered? The court routine proceeded
pleasantly. They smoked right at the judge’s table, and at a con-

national unemployment, the courts reduced the number of verdicts which sen-
tenced prisoners to corrective labor while they continued to live at home and
increased short-term prison sentences. These cases involved only nonpolitical
offenders, of course. As a result, prisons were overcrowded with short-termers
serving sentences of up to six months, and not enough use was being made of
them in labor colonies. At the beginning of 1929, the People’s Commissariat of
Justice of the U.S.S.R., in Circular No. 5, condemned short-term sentences and,
on November 6, 1929, the eve of the twelfth anniversary of the October Revolu-
tion, when the country was supposedly entering on the construction of socialism,
a decree of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Com-
missars simply forbade all sentences of less than one year!

290 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

venient moment broke off for a good lunch. And when evening be-
gan to fall, they had to go and confer. But who confers at night?
They left the prisoners to sit at their desks all night long and
went on home. At nine in the morning they came in all brisk
and freshly shaved: “Rise. The court is in session.” And all the
prisoners were given a “ten-ruble bill” apiece.

And if anyone should object that the OSO at least proceeded
without hypocrisy, whereas there was hypocrisy in instances like
the above—they pretended to be conferring but didn’t really con-
fer—we would certainly have to enter a strong—very strong—
dissent!

Well, the third and final characteristic is dialectics. (Which
used to be crudely described in the folk saying: “Whichever way
you point a wagon tongue, that’s the way it goes.”) The Code
cannot be a dead weight in the path of the judge. The articles of
the Code had been around during ten, fifteen, twenty years of
rapid change, and, just as Faust said:

The whole world changes and everything moves forward,
And why should I be afraid to break my word?

All the articles of the Code had become encrusted with inter-
pretations, directions, instructions. And if the actions of the
accused are not covered by the Code, he can still be convicted:

e By analogy (What opportunities! )

e Simply because of origins (7-35: belonging to a socially
dangerous milieu)?

e For contacts with dangerous persons? (Here’s scope for
you! Who is “dangerous” and what “contacts” consist of
only the judge can say.)

But one should not complain about the precise wording of our
published laws either. On January 13, 1950, a decree was issued
re-establishing capital punishment. (One is bound, of course, to

5. In the Republic of South Africa, terror has gone to such lengths in recent
years that every suspicious (SDE—Socially Dangerous Element) black can be
arrested and held for three months without investigation or trial. Anyone can
see immediately the flimsiness of this: why not from three to ten years?

6. This is something we hadn’t known, something the newspaper Izvestiya
told us in July, 1957.

In the Engine Room | 291

consider that capital punishment never did depart from Beria’s
cellars.) And the decree stated that the death sentence could be
imposed on subversives—diversionists. What did that mean? It
didn’t say. Iosif Vissarionovich loved it that way: not to say all of
it, just to hint. Did it refer only to someone who blew up rails
with TNT? It didn’t say. We had long since come to know what
a “diversionist” was: someone who produced goods of poor qual-
ity was a diversionist. But what was a subversive? Was someone
subverting the authority of the government, for example, in a con-
versation on a streetcar? Or if a girl married a foreigner—wasn’t
she subverting the majesty of our Motherland?

But it is not the judge who judges. The judge only takes his
pay. The directives did the judging. The directive of 1937: ten
years; twenty years; execution by shooting. The directive of 1943:
twenty years at hard labor; hanging. The directive of 1945: ten
years for everyone, plus five of disenfranchisement’ (manpower
for three Five-Year Plans). The directive of 1949: everyone gets
twenty-five.®

The machine stamped out the sentences. The prisoner had
already been deprived of all rights when they cut off his buttons
on the threshold of State Security, and he couldn’t avoid a stretch.
The members of the legal profession were so used to this that
they fell on their faces in 1958 and caused a big scandal. The
text of the projected new “Fundamental Principles of Criminal
Prosecution of the U.S.S.R.” was published in the newspapers,
and they’d forgotten to include any reference to possible grounds
for acquittal. The government newspaper issued a mild rebuke:
“The impression might be created that our courts only bring in
convictions.”® | |

But just take the jurists’ side for a moment: why, in fact, should
a trial be supposed to have two possible outcomes when our
general elections are conducted on the basis of one candidate? An
acquittal is, in fact, unthinkable from the economic point of view!
It would mean that the informers, the Security officers, the inter-

7. Babayev, in fact a nonpolitical, shouted at them: “You can ‘muzzle’ me
for three hundred years! But I'll never lift my hand for you, you benefactors!”

8. Thus it was that a real spy (Schultz, in Berlin, in 1948) could get ten
years, and someone who had never been a spy, Giinther Waschkau, got twenty-
five. Because he was in the wave of 1949.

9. Izvestiya, September 10, 1958.

292 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

rogators, the prosecutor’s staff, the internal guard in the prison,
and the convoy had all worked to no purpose.

Here is one straightforward and typical case that was brought
before a military tribunal. In 1941, the Security operations branch
of our inactive army stationed in Mongolia was called on to show
its activity and vigilance. The military medical assistant Lozovsky,
who was jealous of Lieutenant Pavel Chulpenyev because of some
woman, realized this. He addressed three questions to Chulpenyev
when they were alone: 1. “Why, in your opinion, are we retreating
from the Germans?” (Chulpenyev’s reply: “They have more
equipment and they were mobilized earlier.” Lozovsky’s counter:
“No, it’s a maneuver. We're decoying them.”) 2. “Do you believe
the Allies will help?” (Chulpenyev: “I believe they'll help, but
not from unselfish motives.” Lozovsky’s counter: “They are
deceiving us. They won’t help us at all.”) 3. “Why was Voroshilov
sent to command the Northwest Front?”

Chulpenyev answered and forgot about them. And Lozovsky
wrote a denunciation. Chulpenyev was summoned before the
Political Branch of the division and expelled from the Komsomol:
for a defeatist attitude, for praising German equipment, for be-
littling the strategy of our High Command. The loudest voice
raised against him belonged to the Komsomol organizer Kalyagin,
who had behaved like a coward at the battle of Khalkhin-Gol, in
Chulpenyev’s presence, and therefore found it convenient to get
rid of the witness once and for all.

Chulpenyev’s arrest followed. He had one confrontation with
Lozovsky. Their previous conversation was not even brought up
by the interrogator. One question was asked: “Do you know this
man?” “Yes.” . “Witness, you may leave.” (The interrogator was
afraid the charge might fall through. )*°

Depressed by his month’s incarceration in the sort of hole in the
ground we have already described, Chulpenyev appeared before
a military tribunal of the 36th Motorized Division. Present were
Lebedev, the Divisional Political Commissar, and Slesarev, the
Chief of the Political Branch. The witness Lozovsky was not even

10. Today Lozovsky holds the degree of candidate in medical sciences and
lives in Moscow. Everything is going well with him. Chulpenyev drives a trolley
bus.

In the Engine Room | 293

summoned to testify. However, after the trial, to document the
false testimony, they got Lozovsky’s signature and that of Political
Commissar Seryegin. The questions the tribunal asked were: Did
you have a conversation with Lozovsky? What did he ask you
about? What were your answers? Naively, Chulpenyev told them.
He still couldn’t understand what he was guilty of. “After all,
many people talk like that!” he innocently exclaimed. The tribunal
was interested: “Who? Give us their names.” But Chulpenyev was
not of their breed! He had the last word. “I beg the court to give
me an assignment that will mean my death so as to assure itself
once more of my patriotism”—and, like a simplehearted warrior
of old—‘“Me and the person who slandered me—both of us to-
gether.”

Oh, no! Our job is to kill off all those chivalrous sentiments in
the people. Lozovsky’s duty was to hand out pills and Seryegin’s
duty was to indoctrinate the soldiers." Whether or not you died
wasn’t important. What was important was that we were on guard.
The members of the military tribunal went out, had a smoke and
returned: ten years plus three years’ disenfranchisement.

There were certainly more than ten such cases in every division
during the war. (Otherwise, the military tribunals would not have
justified the cost of maintaining them.) And how many divisions
were there in all? Let the reader count them up himself.

The sessions of the military tribunals were depressingly like one
another. The judges were depressingly faceless and emotionless
—rubber stamps. The sentences all came off the same assembly
line.

Everyone maintained a serious mien, but everyone understood
it was a farce, above all the boys of the convoy, who were the
simplest sort of fellows. At the Novosibirsk Transit Prison in 1945
they greeted the prisoners with a roll call based on cases. “So and
so! Article 58-la, twenty-five years.” The chief of the convoy
guard was curious: “What did you get it for?” “For nothing at
all.” “You're lying. The sentence for nothing at all is ten years.”

When the military tribunals were under pressure, their “ses-
sions” lasted one minute—the time it took them to go out and
come in again. When their working day went on for sixteen con-

11. Viktor Andreyevich Seryegin lives in Moscow today and works in a
Consumer Service Combine attached to the Moscow Soviet. He lives well.

294 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

secutive hours, one could see, through the door of the conference
room, bowls of fruit on a table set with a white tablecloth. If they
weren’t in a hurry, they enjoyed delivering their sentence “with
a psychological twist”: “. . . sentenced to the supreme measure of
punishment!” And then a pause. The judges would look the
condemned man in the eye. It was interesting to see how he took
it. What was he feeling at that moment? Only then would the
verdict continue: “. . . but taking into consideration the sincere
repentance...”

On the walls of the waiting room messages had been scratched
with nails and scrawled in pencil: “I got execution,” “I got twenty-
five,” “I got a ‘tenner!’ ” They didn’t clean off these graffiti; they
served an educational purpose. Be scared; bow down; don’t
think that you can change anything by your behavior. Even if you
were to speak in your own defense with the eloquence of Demos-
thenes, in a hall empty except for a handful of interrogators—
like Olga Sliozberg in 1936, at the Supreme Court—it would
not help you in the slightest. All you could do would be to increase
your sentence from ten years to execution. For instance, if you
were to shout: “You are fascists! I am ashamed to have been a
member of your Party for several years!” (Nikolai Semyonovich
Daskal did it in 1937, at the Special Collegium of the Azov-
Black Sea Province at Maikop, presided over by Kholik.) In
that situation what they did was fabricate a new case and do you
in once and for all.

Chavdarov has described an incident in which the accused
suddenly repudiated at their trial all the false testimony they had
given during the interrogation. And what happened? If there
was any hesitation while glances were exchanged, it lasted no
more than a few seconds. The prosecutor asked for a recess,
without explaining why. The interrogators and their tough-boy
helpers dashed in from the interrogation prison. All the prisoners,
distributed among separate boxes, were given a good beating
all over again and promised another after the next recess. The
recess came to an end. Once again the judges questioned all of
them—and this time they all confessed.

Aleksandr Grigoryevich Karetnikov, the Director of the Textile
Research Institute, provided an example of outstanding astute-
ness. Just before the session of the Military Collegium of the
Supreme Court was to begin, he sent word through the guard

In the Engine Room | 295

that he wanted to give supplementary testimony. This, of course,
provoked curiosity. He was received by the prosecutor. Karetnikov
displayed his infected collarbone, broken by the interrogator
who had struck him with a stool, and declared: “I signed every-
thing under torture.” By this time the prosecutor was cursing
himself for having been so greedy to get “supplementary” testi-
mony, but it was too late. Each of them is fearless only as long
as he is an anonymous cog in the whole machine. But just as
soon as the responsibility has become personalized, individualized,
concentrated on him, just as soon as the searchlight is on him, he
grows pale and realizes that he is nothing and can slip on any
chance banana peel. So Karetnikov caught the prosecutor, and the
latter was unwilling to suppress the whole business. The session of
the Military Collegium began and Karetnikov repeated his state-
ment in front of them. Now there was a case in which the Military
Collegium went out and really conferred! But the only verdict
they could have brought in was acquittal, which would have
meant releasing Karetnikov on the spot. Therefore they brought
in no verdict at all!

As if nothing at all had happened, they took Karetnikov back
to prison, treated his collarbone, and kept him another three
months. A very polite new interrogator entered the case, who
wrote out a new warrant for Karetnikov’s arrest. (If the Col-
legium had not twisted things, he might at least have spent those
three months as a free man.) The interrogator asked the same
questions as the first interrogator. Karetnikov, sensing freedom
in the offing, conducted himself staunchly and refused to admit
any guilt whatever. And what happened next? He got eight years
from an OSO.

This example shows well enough the possibilities available to
the prisoner and the possibilities available to the OSO. It was the
poet Derzhavin who wrote:

A partial court is worse than banditry.

Judges are enemies; there sleeps the law.

In front of you the citizen’s neck

Lies stretched out, quiet and without defense.

But it was a rare thing for such accidents to take place in the
Military Collegium of the Supreme Court. For that matter, it
was in general rare for it to rub clear its clouded eyes and take

te

296 | THE GULAG. ARCHIPELAGO

a look at any individual little tin soldier of a prisoner. In 1937,
A.D.R., an electrical engineer, was taken up to the fourth floor,
running upstairs with a convoy guard on either side of him. (In
all probability, the elevator was working, but there were so many
prisoners pouring in and out that the officials and employees
would not have been able to use the elevator if the prisoners
had been permitted to.) Meeting a convicted prisoner who had
just left, they dashed into the court. The Military Collegium was
in such a hurry they hadn’t sat down yet, and all three members
remained standing. Catching his breath with difficulty, for he
had been weakened by his long interrogation, R. blurted out his
full name. They muttered something, exchanged glances, and
Ulrikh—the very same, no less—proclaimed: “Twenty years!”
And they dragged R. out at a gallop and, at a gallop, dragged in
the next prisoner.

It was all like a dream. In February, 1963, I, too, got to climb
those stairs, but I was courteously accompanied by a colonel who
was also a Communist Party organizer. And in that room with
the circular colonnade, in which, they say, the Plenary Sessions
of the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R. meet—with an enormous
horseshoelike table that had another round table inside it and
seven antique chairs—seventy officials of the Military Collegium
heard me out—that same Military Collegium which once sen-
tenced Karetnikov, and R. and others and others, and so on and
so forth. And I said to them: “What a remarkable day this is!
Although I was first sentenced to camp and then to eternal exile,
I never before saw a single judge face to face. And now I see all
of you assembled here together!” (And they, rubbing their eyes
open, for the first time saw a living zek.)

But it turned out that it had not been they! Yes. They said
it had not been they. They assured me that those others were no
longer present. Some had retired honorably on pensions. A few
had been removed. (Ulrikh, the outstanding executioner of all,
had been removed, it turned out, back in Stalin’s time, in 1950,
for, believe it or not, leniency.) Some of them—there were only
a few of these—had even been tried under Khrushchev, and, in
their role as defendants, they had threatened: “Today you are
trying us. Tomorrow we will try you. Watch out!” But like all
the starts made under Khrushchev, this effort, too, which had

In the Engine Room | 297

been very active at first, was soon abandoned. He dropped it
before it got far enough to produce an irreversible change; which
meant that things were left where they had been.

On that occasion, several veterans of the bench, all speaking up
at the same time, gave voice to their recollections, unwittingly
providing me with material for this chapter. (Oh, if only they
had undertaken to remember and to publish! But the years pass;
another five have gone by; and it has not become any brighter or
lighter.) They recalled how certain judges, at conferences of their
judicial colleagues, took pride when they spoke from the rostrum
of having succeeded in not applying Article 51 of the Criminal
Code, which specifies those circumstances that extenuate guilt,
and thus had succeeded in handing down sentences of twenty-five
years instead of ten. And how the courts had been humiliatingly
subservient to the Organs. A certain judge was trying a case. A
Soviet citizen who had returned from the United States had made
the slanderous statement that there were good automobile roads
in America—and nothing else. That was all there was to the case.
The judge ventured to send the case back for further investiga-
tion for the purpose of getting “genuine anti-Soviet materials”—
in other words, so that the accused could be beaten and tortured.
But his praiseworthy intention wasn’t taken into account. The
angry answer came back: “You mean you don’t trust our
Organs?” And, in the upshot, the judge was exiled to the post
of secretary of a military tribunal on Sakhalin! (Under Khru-
shchev, reproof was not so severe; judges who “made mistakes”
were sent—where do you think?—to work as lawyers.)*? The
prosecutor’s office was just as subservient to the Organs. When,
in 1942, Ryumin’s flagrant abuses in the counterintelligence sec-
tion of the Northern Fleet became known, the prosecutor’s office
did not dare interfere on its own, but only reported respectfully
to Abakumov that his boys were acting up. Abakumov had good
reason to consider the Organs the salt of the earth! (This was the
occasion when he called in Ryumin and promoted him—to his
own eventual undoing. )

There just wasn’t enough time that February day, or they

12. Izvestiya, June 9, 1964. This throws an interesting light on views of legal
defense! In 1918, V. I. Lenin demanded that judges who handed down sentences
that were too lenient be excluded from the Party. `

298 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

would have told me ten times as much as they did. But this, too,
provides food for thought. If both the courts and the prosecutor’s
office were simply pawns of the: Minister of State Security, then
maybe there isn’t any need for a separate chapter to describe them.

They vied with each other in telling me things, and I kept
looking around me in astonishment. They were people! Real
people! They were smiling! They were explaining that their
intentions were of the best. Well, and what if things turn full
circle and it is once again up to them to try me? Maybe even in
that very hall—and they were showing me the main hall.

Well, so they will convict me.

Which comes, first—the chicken or the egg? The people or
the system?

For several centuries we had a proverb: “Don’t fear the law,
fear the judge.”

But, in my opinion, the law has outstripped people, and people
have lagged behind in cruelty. It is time to reverse the proverb:
“Don’t fear the judge, fear the law.”

Abakumov’s kind of law, of course.

They stepped onto the rostrum and talked about Ivan Deniso-
vich. They said happily that the book had eased their consciences
(that’s what they said . . .). They admitted that the picture I
painted was decidedly on the bright side, that every one of them
knew of camps worse than that. (Ah, so they did know?) Of the
seventy people seated around that horseshoe, several turned out
to be knowledgeable in literature, even to be readers of Novy
Mir. They were eager for reform. They spoke forcefully about
our social ulcers, about our neglect of our rural areas.

And I sat there and thought: If the first tiny droplet of truth
has exploded like a psychological bomb, what then will happen in
our country when whole waterfalls of Truth burst forth?

And they will burst forth. It has to happen.

Chapter 8

The Law as a Child

We forget everything. What we remember is not what actually
happened, not history, but merely that hackneyed dotted line
they have chosen to drive into our memories by incessant ham-
mering.

I do not know whether this is a trait common to all mankind,
but it is certainly a trait of our people, And it is a vexing one.
It may have its source in goodness, but it is vexing nonetheless.
It makes us an easy prey for liars.

Therefore, if they demand that we forget even the public trials,
we forget them. The proceedings were open and were reported in
our newspapers, but they didn’t drill a hole in our brains to make
us remember—and so we've forgotten them. Only things repeated
on the radio day after day drill holes in the brain. I am not even
talking about young people, since they, of course, know nothing
of all this, but about people who were alive at the time of those
trials. Ask any middle-aged person to enumerate the highly
publicized open trials. He will remember those of Bukharin and
Zinoviev. And, knitting his brow, that of the Promparty too. And
that’s all. There were no other public trials.

Yet in actual fact they began right after the October Revolu-
tion. In 1918, quantities of them were taking place, in many dif-
ferent tribunals. They were taking place before there were either
laws or codes, when the judges had to be guided solely by the
requirements of the revolutionary workers’ and peasants’ power.
At the same time, they were regarded as blazing their own trail of

299

300 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

bold legality. Their detailed history will someday be written by
someone, and it’s not for us even to attempt to include it in our
present investigation.

However, we cannot do without a brief review. It is our duty,
anyway, to probe some of the charred ruins which go all the way
back to that gentle, misty, rose-colored dawn.

In those dynamic years, the sabers of war were not rusting
in their scabbards, nor did the executioners’ revolvers have time
to grow cold in their holsters. Only later on did the custom de-
velop of hiding executions in cellars under cover of night and of
shooting the victims in the back of the head. In 1918, the famous
Ryazan Chekist Stelmakh had those sentenced to death shot in
the courtyard, during the day, so that prisoners awaiting execu-
tion could watch from the prison windows.

There was an official term current then: extrajudicial reprisal
. .. not because there weren’t any courts at the time, but because
there was the Cheka.* Because it was more efficient. Certainly,
there were courts, and they tried and convicted and executed
people, but we need to remember that, parallel to them and inde-
pendently of them, extrajudicial reprisal went on at the same
time. How can one depict its scale? M. Latsis, in his popular
review of the Cheka’s activity,” gives us material for only a year
and a half (1918 and half of 1919) and for only twenty provinces
of Central Russia (“The figures presented here are far from com-
plete,™ in part, perhaps, out of modesty): those shot by the
Cheka (i.e., without trial, bypassing the courts) numbered 8,389
persons (eight thousand three hundred and eighty-nine) ;* coun-
terrevolutionary organizations uncovered—412 (a fantastic fig-
ure, in view of our inadequate capacity for organization
throughout our history and also the general isolation of indi-
viduals in those years and the general psychological depression) ;
the total of those arrested—87,000° (and this figure smells of
understatement).

1. This fledgling whose beak had not yet hardened was warmed and encour-
aged by Trotsky: “Terror is a powerful means of policy and one would have to
be a hypocrite not to understand this.” And Zinoviev rejoiced too, not yet fore-
seeing his own end: “The letters GPU, like the letters VChK, are the most
popular in the world.”

2. Latsis, Dva Goda Borby na Vnutrennom Fronte.

3. Ibid., p. 74.

4. Ibid., p. 75.

5. Ibid., p. 76.

The Law asaChild | 301

What comparison is available for purposes of evaluation? In
1907 a group of leftist leaders published a collection of essays
entitled Against Capital Punishment,’ in which are listed by
name all those sentenced to death in Tsarist Russia from 1826 to
1906. The editors qualify their findings with the statement that
there were some additional victims, whose names remain un-
known, and that the list is incomplete. (However, it is certainly
not so incomplete as Latsis’ materials compiled during the Civil
War.) The list totals 1,397—from which 233 persons have to be
deducted because their death sentences were commuted, as do an
additional 270, who were sentenced in absentia and never caught
(for the most part Polish rebels who had fled to the West). That
leaves 894, a figure covering eighty years, which is not even close
to Latsis’ total for only one and a half years, and not including all
the provinces of Russia either. True, the editors of the collection
cite another presumed statistic of 1,310 for those sentenced to
death (although perhaps not executed) in 1906 alone, and a total
of 3,419 for 1826 through 1906. But this, mind you, was right
in the midst of the notorious Stolypin reaction, a period for which
an additional figure is available: 950 executions over a period of
six months.’ (In fact, the Stolypin military field tribunals were
in existence for six months all told.) It sounds awful, and yet it
does not make much of an impression on our hardened nerves:
even if we multiply by three this figure of 950 for six months, in
order to compare it with the Latsis figure for eighteen months in
the postrevolutionary period, we still come up with the fact that
the terror after the Revolution was at least three times more in-
tense than Stolypin’s. And that was for just twenty provinces and
excluded courts and tribunals.

And from November, 1917, on, the courts acted on their own.
Despite all the difficulties at the time, Guiding Principles of the
Criminal Law of the R.S.F.S.R. were issued for their use in 1919.
(We have not read this work, could not obtain it, and know only
that it included “imprisonment for an indefinite term”—in other
words, pending a special order.)

The courts were of three kinds: the people’s courts, the circuit
courts, and the Revolutionary Tribunals—the Revtribunals.

6. M. N. Gernet (editor), Protiv Smertnoi Kazni (Against Capital Punish-
ment), second edition, 1907, pp. 385—423.
7. The journal Byloye, No. 2/14, February, 1907.

302 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

The people’s courts handled ordinary misdemeanors and non-
political criminal cases. They were not empowered to impose
death sentences, and, laughable as it seems, the people’s court
could not, in fact, impose sentences exceeding two years. Up to
July, 1918, the heritage of the Left SR’s still endured in our ju-
dicial proceedings. Only by special intervention of the govern-
ment and only individually were impermissibly lenient sentences
raised to twenty years. From July, 1918, on, the people’s courts
were given the right to hand down sentences of up to five years.
And in 1922, when all threats of war had died down, the people’s
courts got the right to impose sentences of up to ten years and lost
the right to sentence anyone to less than six months.

From the beginning, the circuit courts and the Revtribunals
had the power to impose the death sentence, but they lost it for
a brief period: the circuit courts in 1920, and the Revtribunals
in 1921. There were many tiny ups and downs in this period
which only a historian pursuing all the details of those years
would be able to trace.

Perhaps that historian will seek out the documents and un-
roll for us the scroll of tribunal sentences and also the statistics.
(Though probably not. Whatever time and events failed to
destroy was destroyed by persons interested in having such ma-
terial disappear.) We know only that the Revtribunals were not
asleep. They were handing down sentences right.and left. And we
know, too, that every time a city was captured during the Civil
War the event was marked not only by gunsmoke in the court-
yards of the Cheka, but also by sleepless sessions of the tribunal.
And you did not have to be a White officer, a senator, a land-
owner, a monk, a Cadet, an SR, or an Anarchist in order to get
your bullet. Soft white uncallused hands alone were sufficient in
those years. But one can also hazard the guess that in Izhevsk or
Votkinsk, Yaroslavl or Murom, Kozlov or Tambov, the uprisings
were very costly as well to those who had callused workers’ hands.
And if those scrolls—of both the extrajudicial executions and
those by tribunal—are unrolled for us someday, the most surpris-
ing thing will be the number of ordinary peasants we find on
them. Because there was no end to the number of peasant up-
risings and revolts from 1918 to 1921, even though they did not

8. See Part III, Chapter 1.

The Law as a Child | 303

adorn the colored pages of the official History of the Civil War,
and even though no one photographed them, and no one filmed
motion pictures of those furious crowds attacking machine guns
with clubs, pitchforks, and axes and, later, lined up for execution
with their arms tied behind their backs—ten for one! The revolt
in Sapozhok is remembered only in Sapozhok; the one in Pitelino
only in Pitelino. We learn from Latsis the number of peasant
rebellions that were suppressed during that same year and a half
in twenty provinces—344.° (From 1918 on, peasant revolts were
already being called “kulak” revolts, for how could the peasants
revolt against the workers’ and peasants’ power! But how then
could one explain that in every instance it was not just three
peasant huts that revolted but the whole village? Why did the
masses of poor peasants not kill the insurgent “kulaks” with those
same pitchforks and axes, instead of marching with them against
the machine guns? Latsis claims: “The kulaks compelled the
rest of the peasants to take part in these revolts by promises,
slander, and threats.”!? But what could have been more laden
with promises than the slogans of the Committees of the Poor?
And what could have been more loaded with threats than the
machine guns of the Special Purpose Detachments, the CHON?

And how many wholly random people, completely random,
whose destruction inevitably accounts for half the casualties of
every real, shooting revolution, were caught between those mill-
stones?

Here is an eyewitness description of a session of the Ryazan
Revtribunal which met in 1919 to hear the case of the Tolstoyan
I. Ye V. l

With the proclamation of universal and compulsory conscrip-
tion into the Red Army (just one year after the slogans: “Down
with the war!”; “Stick your bayonets in the ground!”; “Go
home!” ), “54,697 deserters were caught and sent to the front” by
September, 1919, in Ryazan Province alone.** (And how many
others were shot on the spot as examples?) Ye v was not a
deserter at all but a man who simply and openly refused to enter
military service because of his religious convictions. He was con-

9. Latsis, op. cit., p .75
10. Ibid., p. 70.
11. Ibid., p. 74.

304 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

scripted by main force, but in the barracks he refused to take
up arms:or undergo training. The enraged Political Commissar of
the unit turned him over to the Cheka, saying: “He does nat
recognize the Soviet government.” There was an interrogation.
Three Chekists sat behind the desk, each with a Naguan revolver
in front of him. “We have seen heroes like you before. You'll be
on your knees to us in a. minute! Either agree to fight immediately,
or we'll shoot you!” But Ye v was firm. He couldn’t fight.
He was a believer in free Christianity. And his case was sent to
the Revtribunal.

It was an open session, with a hundred spectators in the hall.
There was a polite elderly defense lawyer.. The learned. “accuser”
—the term “prosecutor” was forbidden until 1922—was Nikol-
sky, another old jurist. One of the members of the Revtribunal—
a juror—tried to elicit the views of the accused. (How can
you, a representative of the working people, share the opinions
of the aristocrat Count Tolstoi?) But the presiding judge in-
terrupted the questioning and refused to permit it to continue.
There was a quarrel.

Juror: “You do not want to kill people, and you try to persuade
others to refrain from killing. But the Whites began the war, and
you are preventing us from defending.ourselves. We will send you
to Kolchak, and you can preach your nonresistance there!”

Ye v: “I will go wherever you send me.”

Accuser: “This tribunal is not supposed to concern itself with
any nondescript criminal actions but only with those which are
counterrevolutionary. In view of the nature of this crime, I de-
mand that the case be turned over to a people’s court.”

Presiding Judge: “Ha! Actions! What a pettifogger you are!:
We are guided not by the laws but by our revolutionary con-
science!”

Accuser: “I insist that you include my demand in the rec-
ord.”

Defense Attorney: “I support the accuser. The case should
be heard in an ordinary court.”

Presiding Judge: “There’s an old fool for you! Where did they
manage to find him?”

Defense Attorney: “I have been a practicing lawyer for forty
years and this is the first time I have heard such an insult. Enter
it in the record.”

The Law as a Child | 305

Presiding Judge (laughing): “We'll enter it, we'll enter it!”
Laughter in the hall. The court exits in order to confer. The
sounds of a noisy argument come from the conference room.
They return with the sentence: to be shot.

Loud indignation in the hall.

Accuser: “I protest against the sentence and will complain to
the Commissariat of Justice!”

Defense Lawyer: “I join my voice to that of the accuser.”

Presiding Judge: “Clear the hall!”

The convoy came and led Ye——v to jail, saying to him: “Tf
everyone was like you, brother, how good it would be! There
would be no war, and no Whites and no Reds!” They went back
to their barracks and called a Red Army meeting. It condemned
the sentence and sent a protest to Moscow.

In daily expectation of death, Ye y waited for thirty-seven
days, while, from the prison window, he watched executions tak-
ing place. They commuted his sentence to fifteen years of strict
detention.

This is an instructive example. Although “revolutionary legal-
ity” won a partial victory, how enormous an effort it required on
the part of the presiding judge! How much disorganization, lack
of discipline, lack of political consciousness there still was! The
prosecution stood firmly with the defense. The convoy guards
stuck their noses into something that wasn’t their business in
order to send off a protest. Whew, the dictatorship of the prole-
tariat and the new kind of court were not having things easy by
any means! Of course, not all the sessions were anything like so
turbulent, but this wasn’t the only one of its kind. How many
years it would take to reveal, direct, and confirm the necessary
line, until the defense would stand as one with the prosecution
and the court, and the accused would be in agreement with them
too, and all the resolutions of the workers as well!

To pursue this enterprise of many years’ duration is the re-
warding task of the historian. As for us—how are we to make our
way through that rosy mist? Whom are we to ask about it? Those
who were shot aren’t talking, and neither are those who have been
scattered to the four winds. Even if the defendants, and the
lawyers, and the guards, and the spectators have survived, no
one will allow us to seek them out.

Evidently, the only help we will get is from the prosecution.

306 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

In this connection, I was given by well-wishers an intact copy
of a collection of speeches for the prosecution delivered by that
fierce revolutionary, the first People’s Commissar of Military
Affairs in the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government, the Com-
mander in Chief, and later the organizer of the Department of
Exceptional Courts of the People’s Commissariat of Justice—
where the personal rank of tribune was being readied for him,
until Lenin vetoed the title’*—the glorious accuser in the greatest
trials, subsequently exposed as the ferocious enemy of the people,
N. V. Krylenko.** And if, despite everything, we want to at-
tempt a brief review of the public trials, if we are determined to
try to get a feeling for the judicial atmosphere of the first post-
revolutionary years, then we have to learn to read this Krylenko
text. We have no other. And using it as a basis, we must try to
picture to ourselves everything that is missing from it and every-
- thing that happened in the provinces too.

Of course, we would prefer to see the stenographic record of
those trials, to listen to the dramatic voices from beyond the
grave of those first defendants and those first lawyers, speaking
at a time when no one could have foreseen in what implacable
sequence all of it would be swallowed up—together with those
Revtribunal members as well.

However, as Krylenko has explained, for a whole series of
technical reasons “it was inconvenient to publish the stenographic
records”** It was convenient only to publish his speeches for the
prosecution and the sentences handed down by the tribunals,
which by that time had already come to jibe completely with the
demands of the accuser-prosecutor.

Krylenko claims that the archives of the Moscow Revtribunal
and the Supreme Revtribunal turned out (by 1922) to be “far
from orderly. . . . In a whole series of cases the stenographic
records . . . were so incomprehensible that it was necessary either
to cross out entire pages or else to try to restore the text from
memory”! And a “series of the biggest trials”’—including the trial
which followed the revolt of the Left SR’s, and the case of Ad-

12. Lenin, fifth edition, Vol. 36, iş 210.

13. Krylenko, Za Pyat Let (1918-1922). Edition 7,000 copies. Prose-
cution speeches in the most important trials held before the Moscow and the
Supreme Revolutionary Tribunals.

14. Ibid., p. 4.

The Law as a Child | 307

miral Shchastny—“were conducted entirely without stenographic
records.”®

This is strange. The condemnation of the Left SR’s was not a
trivial matter. It was, after the February and October revolutions,
the third turning point in our history, signaling the transition to
a one-party system in the state. Not a few of them were shot. And
no stenographic record was made.

And the “Military Plot” of 1919 was “liquidated by the Cheka
in an extrajudicial reprisal,”’* which “was further proof of its
existence.”*’ (In this case more than one thousand people were
arrested altogether,** and, really, how could trials have been set up
for them all?)

So just try to produce a neat, orderly report on the trials of
those years!

Nevertheless we can learn the important principles involved
in them. For example, the supreme accuser—in other words, the
Prosecutor General—informs us that the All-Russian Central Ex-
ecutive Committee had the right to intervene in any judicial pro-
ceeding. “VTsIK pardons and punishes, at its own discretion
without any limitation whatever.”*® For example, a six-month
sentence was changed to ten years. (And, as the reader under-
stands, it was not necessary for the entire All-Russian Central
Executive Committee to assemble at a plenary meeting to this
end, since its Chairman, Sverdlov, for example, could correct a
sentence without leaving his office.) All of this, Krylenko ex-
plains, “shows the superiority of our system over the false theory
of the separation of powers,””° that is, the theory of the independ-
ence of the judiciary. (True, Sverdlov also said: “It is very good
that the legislative and executive power are not divided by a thick
wall as they are in the West. All problems can be decided
quickly.” Especially on the phone.)

Krylenko formulated even more frankly and precisely the
general tasks of the Soviet courts in his speeches before those
tribunals, when the court was “at one and the same time both

15. Ibid., pp. 4-5.

16. Ibid., p. 7.

17. Ibid., p. 44.

18. Latsis, op. cit., p. 46.

19. Krylenko, op. cit., p. 13. (My italics.)
20. Ibid., p. 14.

308 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

the creator of the law [Krylenko’s italics] . . . and a political
weapon.””*! (My italics.)

Creator of the law because, for four years, there were no codes.
They had thrown out the Tsarist codes, and they had not com-
posed their own. “Don’t tell me our criminal courts ought to act
exclusively on the basis of existing written norms. We live in the
process of Revolution.” “A tribunal is not the kind of court in
which fine points of jurisprudence and clever stratagems are to be
restored. . . . We are creating a new law and new ethical
norms.”*® And also: “No matter how much is said here about the
eternal law of truth, justice, etc., we know. . . how dearly these
have cost us.”?*

(But if your prison terms are compared with ours, maybe it
didn’t cost you so dearly after all? Maybe eternal justice was
somewhat more comfortable?)

The reason that fine points of jurisprudence are unnecessary
is that there is no need to clarify whether the defendant is guilty
or not guilty: the concept of guilt is an old bourgeois concept
which has now been uprooted.”

And so we heard from Comrade Krylenko that a tribunal was
not that kind of court! On another occasion we would hear from
him that a tribunal was not a court at all: “A tribunal is an organ
of the class struggle of the workers directed against their enemies”
and must act “from the point of view of the interests of the revolu-
tion .. . having in mind the most desirable results for the masses
of workers and peasants.”’* People are not people, but “carriers:
of specific ideas.”** “No matter what the individual qualities [of
the defendant], only one method of evaluating him is to be
applied: evaluation from the point of view of class expedi-
ency.’”®

In other words, you can exist only if it’s expedient for the
working class. And if “this expediency should require that the
avenging sword should fall on: the head: of the defendants, then

21. Ibid., p. 3.

22. Ibid., p. 408.

23. Ibid., p. 22. (My italics.)

24. Ibid., p. 505:

25. Ibid., p. 318.

26. Ibid., p. 73. (The italics throughout are mine.)
27. Ibid., p. 83. 7

28. Ibid., p. 79.

The Law asaChild | 309

no... verbal arguments can help.” (Such as arguments by
lawyers, etc.) “In our revolutionary court we are guided not by
articles of the law and not by the degree of extenuating circum-
stances; in the tribunal we must proceed on the basis of con-
siderations of expediency.”*°

That was the way it was in those years: people lived and
breathed and then suddenly found out that their existence was
inexpedient.

And it must also be kept in mind that it was not what he had
done that.constituted the defendant’s burden, but what he might
do if he were not shot now. “We protect ourselves not only
against the past but also against the future.”**

Comrade Krylenko’s pronouncements are clear and all-inclu-
sive. They bring alive for us that whole period of the law in sharp
relief. The clarity of autumn suddenly pierces the mists of spring
and reaches us. And is it perhaps unnecessary to go further?
Perhaps we aren’t required to page through trial after trial. These
pronouncements will be henceforth inexorably applied.

Close your eyes tight for a minute and picture a tiny court-
room—not yet gilded. Earnest members of the tribunal in simple
field jackets, lean, not yet fat-faced. The accusing power—as
Krylenko loved to style himself—wears an unbuttoned civilian
jacket, with a glimpse of a sailor’s striped undershirt just visible
at the open throat.

The supreme accuser expresses himself in this sort of language:
“The question of fact is interesting to me!”; “Define concretely
the aspect of the tendency!”; “We are operating on the plane of
analysis of objective truth.” Sometimes, as you read, a quotation
from the Latin shines out. (It is true that the same quotation turns
up in case after case, but, after several years, a different one does
appear.) And no wonder—he did, after all, complete the course
in two faculties despite all his revolutionary running around.
What attracts one to him are his frank opinions about the de-
fendants: “Professional scoundrels!” And he isn’t hypocritical
in the least. If he didn’t like the defendant’s smile, he didn’t hes-
itate to blurt out a threat, even before any sentence was imposed.

29. [bid:, p: 81.
30. Ibid., p. 524.
31. Ibid., p. 82.

310 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

“And as for you and your smile, Citizeness Ivanova, we'll make
you pay for it, and we'll find a way to fix it so that you never
laugh again”?

So, shall we begin?

A. The Case of “Russkiye Vedomosti”

In this case, one of the earliest, free speech was on trial. On
March 24, 1918, this famous “professorial” newspaper published
an article by Savinkov entitled “En Route.” They would have
much preferred to arrest Savinkov himself, but he really was en
route, damn it, and where was he to be found? So instead they
closed down the paper and brought the elderly editor, P. V.
Yegorov, to court as a defendant, insisting that he explain how
he had dared to publish the article. After all, the New Era was
four months old, and it was time to get used to it!

Yegorov naively defended himself by saying that the article
had been written by a “leading political figure whose opinion was
of general interest whether or not the editors shared it.” Further-
more, he saw nothing slanderous in Savinkov’s having said: “Let
us not forget that Lenin, Natanson, and Co. arrived in Russia
via Berlin; i.e., that the German authorities helped them return
to the homeland”—because that in actual fact was what had hap-
pened; Kaiser Wilhelm’s embattled Germany had helped Com-
rade Lenin to return.

Krylenko retorted that he would not conduct a prosecution
for slander (why not?), and that the newspaper was on trial for
attempting to influence people’s minds! (And how could any
newspaper dare have such a purpose!?)

The formal charge did not include Savinkov’s phrase: “One
has to be criminally insane to affirm seriously that the interna-
tional proletariat will come to our aid’’—because it still would
come to our aid. |

For attempting to influence people’s minds, the newspaper,
which had been published since 1864 and had survived the most
fiercely reactionary periods—those of Loris-Melikov, Pobedo-
nostsev, Stolypin, Kasso, and all the rest—was ordered closed
down forever! And Yegorov, the editor—and this is a shameful

32. Ibid., p. 296.

The Law as a Child | 311

thing to have to say—was given only three months of solitary—
just as though we were in Greece or some such place. (It is not
so shamefully lenient, however, if one stops to think that it was
only 1918! And if the old man managed to survive, he would
be imprisoned again, and many more times too!)

It may seem strange to us now, but it is a fact that in those
thunderous years bribes were given and taken just as tenderly
as they had been from time immemorial in Old Russia and as
they will be in the Soviet Union from here to eternity. Bribery
was particularly rife in the judicial organs. And, though we blush
to say it, in the Cheka. The official histories in their red, gold-
stamped bindings are silent about this, but the old folks and eye-
witnesses remember that the fate of political prisoners in the first
years of the Revolution, as distinct from Stalinist times, often
depended on bribes: they were accepted uninhibitedly, and pris-
oners were honestly released as a result. Although Krylenko
picked out only a dozen cases for the five-year period his book
covers, he reports two cases of bribery. Alas, even the Moscow
Tribunal and the Supreme Tribunal squeezed their way through
to perfection along a crooked path, muddied themselves in im-
proprieties.

B. The Case of the Three Interrogators of the Moscow Revtribunal—
April, 1918

In March, 1918, a speculator in gold bars named Beridze was
arrested. His wife tried to find a way to ransom her husband,
which was the accepted thing to do. Through a series of connec-
tions she succeeded in getting to one of the interrogators, who
brought two others in with him. Meeting secretly, they demanded
a bribe of 250,000 rubles, but, after some bargaining, they re-
duced it to 60,000, half in advance. The deal was to be made
through the lawyer Grin. Everything would have gone off without
a fuss, as hundreds of similar deals had, and the case would have
gotten into neither Krylenko’s chronicle nor ours, nor even be-
come a matter of concern to the Council of People’s Commissars,
had it not been that Beridze’s wife began to get miserly, and
brought Grin only 15,000 as an advance payment, instead of

312 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

30,000. But the main thing was that, in consequence of female
fickleness, she changed her mind overnight, decided ‘her lawyer
wasn’t good enough for her, and went off the next morning to
find another, the attorney Yakulov. It is not stated anywhere, but
it was evidently Yakulov who decided to turn in the interrogators.

It is of interest that all the witnesses in this trial, beginning
with the unfortunate wife, tried to give testimony helpful to the
accused and to befuddle the prosecution. (Which would have
been impossible in a political trial!) Krylenko explained their
conduct.as:the result of a narrow-minded, philistine attitude, be-
cause they ‘felt like outsiders as far as the Revtribunal was con-
cerned. (And might we ourselves be so audacious as to advance
the philistine hypothesis that in the course of a year and a half
the witnesses had already learned to be afraid of the dictatorship
of the proletariat? After all, it took a lot of nerve to turn in the
interrogators of the Revtribunal. What would happen to you
after that?)

The accuser’s line of argument is also -of interest. After all,
just a month earlier the defendants had been his associates, his
comrades in arms, his assistants. They were people who had
‘been inalienably dedicated to the interests of the Revolution, and
one. of them, Leist, was.even “a stern accuser, capable of hurling
thunder and lightning at anyone who attacked the foundations.”
What was he to say about them now? Where was he to look for
the causes of their fall? (A bribe was not enough in itself.) And,
of course, it is clear where he looked: in their pasts, in their biog-
graphies!

Declared Krylenko: “If we look closely” at this Leist, “we will
find highly interesting information.” This is intriguing. Was he
an inveterate adventurer? No, but he was the son of a professor
at Moscow University! And not an ordinary professor, but one
who had survived twenty years of reaction by his indifference to
political activity! (And who, notwithstanding that reaction, had
been accepted by Krylenko as a consultant.) Was it surprising,
then, that the son turned out to be a double-dealer?

As for Podgaisky, he was the son of an official in the law courts
- . - beyond doubt one of the reactionary, pogrom-organizing
Black Hundreds; otherwise how could he have served the Tsar
for twenty years? And the son, too, had prepared for a career in

The Law as a Child | 313

the law courts, but then the Revolution had come—and he had
wormed his way into the Revtribunal. Just yesterday all this had
been depicted in a very favorable light, but it had suddenly be-
come repulsive!

More repulsive than them both was, of course, Gugel. He had
been a publisher. And what intellectual food had he been offer-
ing the workers and peasants? He was “nourishing the broad
masses. with low-quality literature,” not Marx but, instead, books
by bourgeois professors with world-famous names. (And we
shall soon encounter these professors as defendants too. )

Krylenko is enraged and marvels at the kind of people who
have sneaked into the tribunal. (Neither do we understand: What
kind of people are the workers’ and peasants’ tribunals composed
of? Why had the proletariat entrusted the task of striking down
their enemies to people of this particular kind?)

And as for Grin, the lawyer, a man with an “in” on the in-
vestigating commission, who was quite able to get anybody off
scot-free, he was a typical representative of that subspecies of
the human race which Marx called “leeches on the capitalist
structure”’—a category including, in addition, all lawyers, gen-
darmes, priests, and also . . . notaries.*°

It appears that Krylenko spared no effort in demanding merci-
lessly severe sentences, without reference to “the individual shad-
ings of guilt.” But some kind of lethargy, some sort of torpor,
overcame the eternally vigorous tribunal, and it,just barely man-
aged to mumble six months in jail for the interrogators, and a
fine for the lawyer. And only by availing himself of the authority
of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee “to punish
without limitation,” did Krylenko, there in the Metropole, con-
tinue to hang ten-year sentences on the interrogators and five
on the lawyer, plus full confiscation of his property. Krylenko
thundered on about vigilance, and he almost managed, but not
quite, to get the title of Tribune he so coveted.

We recognize that among the revolutionary masses at the
time, as among our readers today, this unfortunate trial could not
but undermine faith in the sanctity of the tribunal. And we there-
fore proceed with even greater timidity to the next case, which
concerned an even loftier institution.

33. Ibid., p. 500.

314 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

C. The Case of Kosyrev—February 15, 1919

F. M. Kosyrev and his pals Libert, Rottenberg, and Solovyev
had first served on the Commission for Supply of the Eastern
Front (back before Kolchak, when the enemy forces were the
armies of the Constituent Assembly). It was discovered that
there they had found ways to siphon into their own pockets from
seventy thousand to a million rubles at a time; they rode around
on fine horses and engaged in orgies with the nurses. Their Com-
mission had acquired a house and an automobile, and their major-
domo lived it up in the Yar Restaurant. (We aren’t accustomed
to picturing 1918 in this light, but all this was in the testimony
of the Revtribunal. )

But none of this, to be sure, was the case against them. No
charge had been brought against any of them in connection with
their activities on the Eastern Front; they had even been forgiven
all that. But wonder of wonders! Hardly had their Commission
for Supply been disbanded than all four of them, with the addition
of Nazarenko, a former Siberian tramp and convict pal of
Kosyrev in criminal hard labor, were invited to constitute .. .
the Control and Auditing Collegium of the VChK—the Cheka!

Here’s what this Collegium was: it had plenipotentiary powers
to verify the legality of the actions of all the remaining organs of
the Cheka, the right to demand and review any case at any stage
of its processing, and to reverse the decisions of all the remaining
organs of the VChK, excepting only the Presidium of the
Cheka!”** This was no small thing. This Collegium was second-
in-command in the Cheka after the Presidium itself—it ranked
immediately below Dzerzhinsky-Uritsky-Peters-Latsis-Menzhin-
sky-Yagoda!

The way of life of this comradely group remained just what it
had been before. They didn’t get swelled heads; they didn’t get
carried away. With certain individuals named Maximych, Lenka,
Rafailsky, and Mariupolsky, “who had no connection at all with
the Communist Party,” they set up—in private apartments and
in the Hotel Savoy—“lavish establishments where card games
with table stakes as high as a thousand rubles a throw were the
order of the day, along with heavy drinking and women.” Kosyrev
acquired a rich establishment of his own (costing 70,000 rubles)

34. Ibid., p. 507.

The Law as a Child | 315

and, in fact, did not even draw the line at hauling off silver spoons
and goblets, and even ordinary glassware, from the Cheka. (And
how did all these objects get to the Cheka?) “And this was where
his attention was concentrated, rather than in the direction of
ideas and ideology, and this was what he took from the revolu-
tionary movement.” (In the very act of repudiating the bribes he
had accepted, this leading Chekist, without blinking, volunteered
the lie that he possessed 200,000 rubles from an inheritance in a
Chicago bank! Evidently, as far as he was concerned, there was
no conflict between such a circumstance and world revolution! )

Now how did he propose to make proper use of his super-
human right to arrest anyone at all and release anyone at all?
Clearly, one had to find a fish with golden roe—and in 1918
there were not a few such fish in the nets. (After all, the Revolu-
tion had been carried out too quickly; they hadn’t found every-
thing—how many precious stones, necklaces, bracelets, rings,
and earrings the bourgeois ladies had managed to hide away!)
Then one had to make contact with the relatives of those who
had been arrested through some reliable middleman.

Such characters also pass before us at the trial. There was Us-
penskaya, a woman of twenty-two. She had graduated from the St.
Petersburg Gymnasium, but hadn’t gone on to the university—
the Soviets had come to power—and so, in the spring of 1918,
Uspenskaya appeared at the Cheka to offer her services as an in-
former. She qualified on the basis of her appearance, and they
accepted her.

Krylenko has this to say about informing, which in those days
had a different label: “For ourselves, we see nothing shameful in
it, we consider this to be our duty . . . the work itself is not dis-
graceful; once a person admits that this work is necessary in the
interests of the Revolution, then he must do it.” But, alas, it
turned out that Uspenskaya had no political credo! That’s what
was awful. She declared: “I agreed in order to be paid a fixed
percentage” on the cases which were turned up, and, beyond that,
“to split 50-50” with someone else . . . whom the court protected
and instructed her not to identify. Krylenko put it in his own
words: “Uspenskaya was not a staff member of the Cheka but
worked at piece rates.”*® And, incidentally, the accuser, under-

35. Ibid., p. 513. (My italics.)
36. Ibid., p. 507.

316 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

standing her in a very human way, explains that she had grown
used to having plenty of money, and that her insignificant salary of
500 rubles from the Supreme Council of the Economy was nothing
at all, considering that one exercise in extortion—for example,
helping a merchant get the seal removed from his store—would
net her 5,000 rubles, and another—from Meshcherskaya-Grevs,
wife of a prisoner—would bring in 17,000. For that matter,
Uspenskaya served only briefly as a mere stool pigeon. Thanks to
the help of certain big Chekists, in a few months she became
a member of the Communist Party and an interrogator.
However, we don’t seem to be getting to the essence of the
case. Uspenskaya had arranged a meeting between this Meshch-
erskaya-Grevs and a certain Godelyuk, a bosom pal of Kosyrev,
in order to reach an agreement on her husband’s ransom. (They
had initially demanded 600,000 rubles!) But unfortunately, by
some still unexplained means, the arrangements for that secret
meeting became known to the same attorney, Yakulov, who had
already done in the three bribe-taking interrogators and who,
evidently, felt a class hatred for the whole proletarian system of
judicial and extrajudicial processing. Yakulov denounced them to
the Moscow Revtribunal,*’ and the presiding judge of the tribunal,
recalling perhaps the wrath of the Council of People’s Commissars
in connection with the three interrogators, also blundered in
terms of class premises. Instead of simply warning Comrade
Dzerzhinsky and working it all out in the family, he hid a steno-
grapher behind the curtain. And the stenographer took down all
Godelyuk’s references to Kosyrev, and to Solovyev and to other
commissars, and all his stories about who in the Cheka takes how
many thousands. Then, as per the stenographic record, Godelyuk
received an advance payment of 12,000 rubles, and Meshcher-
skaya-Grevs was given a pass to enter the Cheka that had already
been filled out by the Control and Auditing Collegium, by Libert
and Rottenberg. (The bargaining was to continue there, inside
the Cheka.) Then and there Godelyuk was caught! In his con-

37. In order to temper the reader’s indignation against this leechlike snake,
Yakulov, we should point out that by the time of Kosyrev’s trial he had already
been arrested and was in custody. They had found a case to take care of him.
He was brought in to testify accompanied by convoy, and we are certainly
entitled to hope that he was shot soon afterward. (Today we are surprised:
How did things reach such a pitch of illegality? Why did no one mount an
Offensive against it?)

The Law as a Child | 317

fusion, he gave testimony against them! (And Meshcherskaya-
Grevs had already gotten to the Control and Auditing Collegium,
and they had already ordered her husband’s case transferred there
for verification. )

But just a moment! After all, an exposé like this sullies the
heavenly blue uniforms of the Cheka! Was the presiding judge of
the Moscow Revtribunal in his right mind? Was he really tending
to his own business?

But it turns out that that was the nature of the moment—a
moment totally hidden from us in the folds of our majestic history!
It seems that the Cheka’s first year of work had produced a some-
what repellent impression even on the Party of the proletariat,
which still hadn’t gotten used to it. Only its first year had passed;
the Cheka had taken only the first step on its glorious path; and
already, as Krylenko writes, although not very clearly, a “dispute”
had arisen “between the court and its functions and the extra-
judicial functions of the Cheka . . . a dispute which, at the time,
split the Party and the workers’ districts into two camps.”** And
that is how the Kosyrev case could come up—whereas everything
had gone smoothly before—and reach all the way up to the top-
most level of the whole state apparatus.

The Cheka had to be saved! Help! Save the Cheka! Solovyev
asked the tribunal to allow him inside the Taganka Prison to
visit Godelyuk (who, alas, was not in the Lubyanka) so as to
chat with him. The tribunal declined the request. Then Solovyev
managed to penetrate into Godelyuk’s cell without the help of
any tribunal, and—what a coincidence!—at that very point
Godelyuk became seriously ill. (“One can hardly speak of evil
intentions on Solovyev’s part,” Krylenko bows and scrapes.)
Feeling the approach of death, Godelyuk shakily repented hav-
ing slandered the Cheka and asked for a sheet of paper on which
to write his recantation: it was all untrue; he had slandered
Kosyrev and the other commissars of the Cheka, and everything
the stenographer had-taken down behind the curtain was also
untrue! *°

38. Krylenko, op. cit., p. 14.

39. Oh, how many themes we have here! Oh, where is Shakespeare? Solovyev
passes through the walls, flickering shadows in the cell, Godelyuk recants with
failing hand. And all we hear about the years of the Revolution in our plays
and our films is the street singing of “Hostile Whirlwinds.”

318 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

“And who filled out the passes for Meshcherskaya-Grevs?”
Krylenko insisted. They hadn’t materialized out of thin air, cer-
tainly? No, the chief accuser “does not wish to say that Solovyev
was an accessory in this case, because . . . because there is in-
sufficient evidence,” but he advances the hypothesis that “citizens
still at liberty who were in danger of being caught with their
hands in the till” might have sent Solovyev to the Taganka jail.

This was the perfect time to question Libert and Rottenberg,
and they were subpoenaed, but they didn’t appear! Just like that!
They didn’t show up. They declined to. All right, in that case
question Meshcherskaya-Grevs! And—can you imagine it?—
this broken-down aristocrat, too, was so brazen as not to appear
before the Revtribunal! And there was no way to force her to!
Godelyuk had recanted—and was dying. Kosyrev refused to
admit anything! Solovyev was not guilty of anything! So there
was no one to question.

What witnesses, on the other hand, did indeed appear before
the tribunal, and of their own free will! The Deputy Chief of the
Cheka, Comrade Peters. And even Feliks Edmundovich Dzer-
zhinsky himself. He arrived in a state of alarm. His long, burning
zealot’s face confronted the tribunal—whose members sat with
sinking hearts—and he testified passionately in defense of the
totally innocent Kosyrev and his high moral, revolutionary, and
professional qualities. This testimony, alas, has not been pre-
served for us, but Krylenko refers to it this way: “Solovyev and
Dzerzhinsky portrayed Kosyrev’s wonderful qualites.”*° (Alas,
you careless shavetail, you! In twenty years’ time, in the Lub-
yanka, they are going to remind you of that trial!) It is easy to
guess what Dzerzhinsky could have said: that Kosyrev was an
iron Chekist, merciless to their enemies; that he was a good
comrade. A hot heart, a cool head, clean hands.

And from the garbage heap of slander, the bronze knight
Kosyrev rises before our eyes. Furthermore, his whole biography
testifies to his remarkable will. Before the Revolution he was
convicted several times—most often for murder. In the city of
Kostroma, he was convicted of worming his way by deception
into the house of an old woman named Smirnova and strangling
her with his own hands; then of an attempt to kill his own father;

40. Krylenko, op. cit., p. 522.

The Law as a Child | 319

and then of killing a comrade in order to use his passport. The
rest of Kosyrev’s convictions were for swindling, and in all he
spent many years at hard labor. (One could understand his
desire for a luxurious life.) And he had only been freed by the
Tsarist amnesties.

At that point, the stern and righteous voices of the major
Chekists interrupted the chief accuser; they pointed out to him
that those courts which had convicted Kosyrev were courts of
the bourgeoisie and landowners and did not merit being noticed
in our new society. But what happened? The shavetail, going
overboard, poured forth from the chief accuser’s rostrum a tirade
so ideologically faulty that in our exposition of this harmonious
series of cases tried by the tribunals, citing it is to strike a dis-
cordant note.

“If there was anything good in the old Tsarist court system,
it was only trial by jury. . . . One could always have confidence
in the jurors’ decisions and a minimum of judicial error was to
be found in them.”*?

It was all the more vexing to hear this sort of thing from
Comrade Krylenko because just three months before, at the trial
of the provocateur R. Malinovsky, a former favorite of the Com-
munist Party leadership, who, notwithstanding his four criminal
convictions in the past, had been co-opted into the Central
Committee by the leadership and appointed to the Duma, the
accusing power had taken an impeccable class stand.

“Every crime is the result of a given social system, and in
these terms criminal convictions under the laws of a capitalist
society and in Tsarist times do not, in our eyes, constitute a fact
branding a person with an indelible mark once and for all... .
We know of many examples of persons in our ranks branded
by such facts in the past, but we have never drawn the con-
clusion that it was necessary to remove such a person from our
milieu. A person who knows our principles cannot fear that the
existence of previous criminal convictions in his record will
jeopardize his being included in the ranks of the revolution-
aries.”*

That is how Comrade Krylenko could speak when in a Party

41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., p. 337.

320 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

vein. But in this other case, as a result of his mistaken judgment,
the image of the knight in shining armor, Kosyrev, was being
bespattered. And it created a situation in the tribunal wherein
Comrade Dzerzhinsky was forced to say: “For just one second
[Just one second!] the thought crossed my mind that citizen
Kosyrev might be falling victim to the political passions which in
recent times have blazed up around the Extraordinary Commis-
sion.”

And Krylenko suddenly took thought: “I do not wish, and I
never have wished, that the present trial should turn into a trial
of the Cheka rather than a trial of Kosyrev and Uspenskaya. Not
only am I unable to desire such an outcome: I am obliged to fight
against it with all available means!” And he went on: “The most
responsible, honest, and self-controlled comrades were put at
the head of the Extraordinary Commission, and they took on
themselves the difficult task of striking down the enemy, even
though this involved the risk of error. . . . For this the Revolution
is obliged to say thank you. . . . I underline this aspect so that

. no one can ever say to me later: ‘He turned out to be an
instrument of political treason!’ ”** (But that’s what they will say!)

What a razor edge the supreme accuser was walking! But he
evidently had certain contacts, going back to his days in the
underground, through which he learned how things were going
to move on the morrow. This is conspicuous in several trials, and .
came out here too. At the beginning of 1919, there were certain
trends toward saying: “It is enough! It is time to bridle the
Cheka!” And this moment was “beautifully caught in Bukharin’s
essay, in which he said that revolutionary legality must give way
to legalized revalutionality.”*

Wherever you look you see dialectics! And Krylenko burst
out: “The Revtribunal is being called on to replace the Extraor-
dinary Commission.” (To replace???) Meanwhile, it “must be
. . -nO less fierce in implementing the system of terror, intimida-
tion, and threat than was the Extraordinary Commission—the
Cheka.” |

Than it was? The past tense? Has he already buried it? Come

43. Ibid., p. 509.
44. Ibid., pp. 505-510. (My italics.)

45. Ibid., p. 511.
46. Ibid.

The Law as a Child | 321

now, you are going to replace it, and where are the Chekists
supposed to go? Ominous days! That was reason enough to hurry
to the tribunal, in a greatcoat down to one’s heels, to testify as a
witness.

But perhaps your sources of information, Comrade Krylenko,
are false?

Yes, the heavens darkened over the Lubyanka in those days.
And this whole book might have been very different. But I sup-
pose that what happened was that iron Feliks Dzerzhinsky went
to see Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and talked it over and explained.
And the skies cleared. And although two days later, on Feb-
ruary 17, 1919, the Cheka was deprived of its judicial rights by
special decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee—
it was “not for long.”*

Our day in court was further complicated by the fact that the
objectionable Uspenskaya behaved abominably. From the de-
fendants’ bench she “threw mud at” leading Chekists who had
not previously been touched by the trial, including Comrade
Peters! (She turned out to have used his pure name in her black-
mailing operations; she used to sit right in his office, without
any ceremony, during his conversations with other intelligence
agents.) Now she hinted at some dark prerevolutionary past of
his in Riga. That’s the kind of snake she had turned into in eight
months, despite the fact that she had been with Chekists during
those eight months! What was to be done with such a woman?
Here Krylenko’s position jibed completely with that of the
Chekists: “Until a firm regime has been established, and we are a
long way from. that being the case [Are we really???] . . . in the
interests of the defense of the Revolution . . . there is not and
cannot be any sentence for citizeness Uspenskaya other than her
annihilation.” He did not say “to be shot’—what he said was
“annihilation”! But after all, Citizen Krylenko, she’s just a young
girl! Come on now, give her a “tenner,” or maybe a “twenty-
five,” and maybe the system will be firmly established by then?
How about it? But alas: “In the interests of society and of the
Revolution there is no other answer, nor can there be one—and
the question cannot be put any other way. In the given case,
detention isn’t going to bear any fruit!”

47. Ibid., p. 14.

322 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

She had sure rubbed the salt in. . . . She knew too much....

And Kosyrev had to be sacrificed too. They shot him. It was
for the health of the others.

Can it really be that someday we will read the old Lubyanka
archives? No, they will burn them. They already have.

As the reader can see for himself, this was a very unimportant
case. We didn’t have to dwell on it. But here is a different one.

D. The Case of the “Churchmen”—January 11-16, 1920

This case, in Krylenko’s opinion, is going to have a “suitable
place in the annals of the Russian Revolution.” Right there in
the annals, indeed! It took one day to wring Kosyrev’s neck, but
in this case they dragged things out for five whole days.

The principal defendants were: A. D. Samarin (a famous
man in Russia, the former chief procurator of the Synod; a man
who had tried to liberate the church from the Tsar’s yoke, an
enemy of Rasputin whom Rasputin had forced out of office);
Kuznetsov, Professor of Church Law at Moscow University; the
Moscow archpriests Uspensky and Tsvetkov. (The accuser him-
self had this to say about Tsvetkov: “An important public figure,
perhaps the best that the clergy could produce, a philanthropist.” )

Their guilt lay in creating the “Moscow Council of United
Parishes,” which had in turn recruited, from among believers
forty to eighty years old, a voluntary guard for the Patriarch
(unarmed, of course), which had set up permanent day and night
watches in his residence, who were charged with the responsi-
bility, in the event of danger from the authorities to the Patriarch,
of assembling the people by ringing the church alarm bells and by
telephone, so that a whole crowd might follow wherever the
Patriarch might be taken and beg—and there’s your counter-
revolution for you!—the Council of People’s Commissars to re-
lease him!

What an ancient Russian—Holy Russian—scheme! To as-
semble the people by ringing the alarm bells . . . and proceed in
a crowd with a petition!

48. But accuser Krylenko saw no difference whatever between Samarin and
Rasputin.

The Law as a Child | 323

And the accuser was astonished. What danger threatened the
Patriarch? Why had plans been made to defend him?

Well, of course, it was really no more than the fact that the
Cheka had for two years been conducting extrajudicial reprisals
against undesirables, the fact that only a short while before four
Red Army men in Kiev had killed the Metropolitan, the fact that
the Patriarch’s “case had already been worked up and com-
pleted, and all that remained was to bring it before the Rev-
tribunal,” and “it was only out of concern for the broad masses
of workers and peasants, still under the influence of clerical
propaganda, that we have left these, our class enemies, alone for
the time being.”*” How could Orthodox believers possibly be
alarmed on the Patriarch’s account? During those two years
Patriarch Tikhon had refused to keep silent. He had sent messages
to the People’s Commissars, to the clergy, and to his flock. His
messages were not accepted by the printers but were copied on
typewriters (the first samizdat). They exposed the annihilation
of the innocents, the ruin of the country. How, therefore, could
anyone really be concerned for the Patriarch’s life?

A second charge was brought against the defendants. ‘Through-
out the country, a census and requisition of church property was
taking place (this was in addition to the closing of monasteries
and the expropriation of church lands and properties; in question
here were liturgical vessels, cups, and candelabra). And the
Council of Parishes had disseminated an appeal to believers to
resist the requisition, sounding the alarm on the church bells.
(And that was natural, after all! That, after all, was how they
had defended the churches against the Tatars too!)

And the third charge against them was their incessant, im-
pudent dispatching of petitions to the Council of People’s Com-
missars for relief from the desecration of the churches by local
authorities, from crude blasphemy and violations of the law which
guaranteed freedom of conscience. Even though no action was
taken on these petitions (according to the testimony of Bonch-
Bruyevich, administrative officer of the Council of People’s Com-
missars), they had discredited the local authorities.

Taking into consideration all the violations committed by these
defendants, what punishment could the accuser possibly demand

49. Krylenko, op. cit., p. 61.

324 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

for these awful crimes? Will not the reader’s revolutionary con-
Science prompt the answer? To be shot, of course. And that is
just what Krylenko did demand—for Samarin and Kuznetsov.

But while they were fussing around with these damned legal
formalities, and listening to too many long speeches from too
many bourgeois lawyers (speeches which “for technical reasons”
we will not cite here), it turned out that capital punishment had
been . . . abolished! What a fix! It just couldn’t be! What had
happened? It developed that Dzerzhinsky had issued this order to
the Cheka (the Cheka, without capital punishment? ). But had it
been extended to the tribunals by the Council of People’s Com-
missars? Not yet. Krylenko cheered up. And he continued to de-
mand execution by shooting, on the following grounds:

“Even if we suppose that the consolidation of the Republic has
removed the immediacy of threat from such persons, it seems
nonetheless indubitable that in this period of creative effort...
a purge ... of the old turncoat leaders . . . is required by revolu-
tionary necessity.” And further: “Soviet power is proud of the
decree of the Cheka abolishing the death penalty.” But this “still
does not force us to conclude that the question of the abolition of
capital punishment has been decided once and for all . . . for
the entire period of Soviet rule.””°

That was quite prophetic! Capital punishment would return—
and very soon too! After all, what a long line still remained to
be rubbed out! (Yes, including Krylenko too, and many of his
class brothers as well.)

And, indeed, the tribunal was submissive and sentenced
Samarin and Kuznetsov to be shot, but they did manage to tack
on a recommendation for clemency: to be imprisoned in a con-
centration camp until the final victory over world imperialism!
(They would still be sitting there today!) And as for “the best
that the clergy could produce”—his sentence was fifteen years,
commuted to five.

Other defendants as well were dragged into this trial in order
to add at least a little substance to the charges. Among them
were some monks and teachers of Zvenigorod, involved in the
Zvenigorod affair in the summer of 1918, but for some reason
not brought to trial for a year and a half (or they might have
been, but were now being tried again, since it was expedient).

50. Ibid., p. 81.

The Law as a Child | 325

That summer some Soviet officials had called on Father Superior
Ion at the Zvenigorod monastery and ordered him (“Step
lively there!”) to turn over to them the holy relics of St. Savva.
The officials not only smoked inside the church and evidently be-
hind the altar screen as well, and, of course, refused to take off
their caps, but one of them took Savva’s skull in his hands and be-
gan to spit into it, to demonstrate that its sanctity was an illusion.
And there were further acts of desecration. This led to the alarm
bell being sounded, a popular uprising, and the killing of one or
two of the officials. (The others denied having committed any
acts of desecration, including the spitting incident, and Krylenko
accepted their denials.)°* Were these officials the ones on trial
now? No, the monks.

We beg the reader, throughout, to keep in mind: from 1918
on, our judicial custom determined that every Moscow trial,
except, of course, the unjust trial of the Chekists, was by no
means an isolated trial of an accidental. concatenation of cir-
cumstances which had converged by accident; it was a landmark
of judicial policy; it was a display-window model whose specifi-
cations determined what product was good for the provinces too;
it was a standard; it was like that one-and-only model solution
up front in the arithmetic book for the schoolchildren to follow
for themselves.

Thus, when we say, “the trial of the churchmen,” this must be
understood in the multiple plural . . . “many trials.” And, in fact,
the supreme accuser himself willingly explains: “Such trials have
rolled along through almost all the tribunals of the Republic.”
(What language!) They had taken place not long before in the
tribunals in North Dvina, Tver, and Ryazan; in Saratov, Kazan,
Ufa, Solvychegodsk, and Tsarevokokshaisk, trials were held of
the clergy, the choirs, and the active members of the congrega-

51. Firguf, a former guards officer of the Tsar’s household cavalry, who
had “suddenly undergone a spiritual conversion, given all his goods to the
poor, and entered a monastery, but I do not in fact know whether he actually
did distribute his goods to the poor.” Yes, and if one admits the possibility of
spiritual conversion, what then remains of class theory?

52. But which of us doesn’t remember similar scenes? My first memory is
of an event that took place when J was, probably, three or four: The peaked-
heads (as they called the Chekists in their: high-peaked Budenny caps) invaded
a Kislovodsk church, sliced: through the dumbstruck crowd-of worshipers, and,
in their pointed caps, went straight through the altar sereen to. the altar and
stopped the service.

326 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

tion—representatives of the ungrateful “Orthodox church,
liberated by the October Revolution.”*

The reader will be aware of a conflict here: why did many of
these trials occur earlier than the Moscow model? This is simply
a shortcoming of our exposition. The judicial and the extrajudicial
persecution of the liberated church had begun well back in 1918,
and, judging by the Zvenigorod affair, it had already reached a
peak of intensity by that summer. In October, 1918, Patriarch
Tikhon had protested in a message to the Council of People’s
Commissars that there was no freedom to preach in the churches
and that “many courageous priests have already paid for their
preaching with the blood of martyrdom. . . . You have laid your
hands on church property collected by generations of believers,
and you have not hesitated to violate their posthumous intent.”
(The People’s Commissars did not, of course, read the message,
but the members of their administrative staff must have had a
good laugh: Now they've really got something to reproach us
with—posthumous intent! We sh-t on your ancestors! We are
only interested in descendants.) “They are executing bishops,
priests, monks, and nuns who are guilty of nothing, on the basis of
indiscriminate charges of indefinite and vaguely counterrevolu-
tionary offenses.” True, with the approach of Denikin and
Kolchak, this was stopped, so as to make it easier for Orthodox
believers to defend the Revolution. But hardly had the Civil War
begun to die down than they took up their cudgels against the
church again, and the cases started rolling through the tribunals
once more. In 1920 they struck at the Trinity-St. Sergius Mona-
stery and went straight to the holy relics of that chauvinist Sergius
of Radonezh, and hauled them off to a Moscow museum.**

53. Krylenko, op. cit., p. 61.

54. The Patriarch cited Klyuchevsky: “The gates of the monastery of the
Saint will shut and the ikon lamps will be extinguished over his sepulcher only
when we shall have lost every vestige of that spiritual and moral strength willed
to us by such great builders of the Russian land as Saint Sergius.” Klyuchevsky
did not imagine that the loss would occur almost in his own lifetime. The
Patriarch asked for an appointment with the Chairman of the Council of
People’s Commissars, in the hope of persuading him not to touch the holy
monastery and the relics . . . for after all the church was separate from the
state! The answer came back that the Chairman was occupied in discussing
important business, and that the appointment could not be arranged for the
near future.

Nor for the distant future either.

The Law asaChild | 327

The People’s Commissariat of Justice issued a directive, dated
August 25, 1920, for the liquidation of relics of all kinds, since
they were a significant obstacle to the resplendent movement
toward a new, just society.

Pursuing further Krylenko’s own selection of cases, let us also
examine the case tried in the Verkhtrib—in other words, the
Supreme Tribunal. (How affectionately they abbreviated words
within their intimate circle, but how they roared out for us little
insects: “Rise! The court is in session!” )

E. The Case of the “Tactical Center”—August 16-20, 1920

In this case there were twenty-eight defendants present, plus
additional defendants who were being tried in absentia because
they weren’t around.

At the very beginning of his impassioned speech, in a voice
not yet grown hoarse and in phrases illumined by class analysis,
the supreme accuser informs us that in addition to the land-
owners and the capitalists “there existed and there continues to
exist one additional social stratum, the social characteristics of
which have long since been under consideration by the repre-
sentatives of revolutionary socialism. [In other words: to be or
not to be?] This stratum is the so-called ‘intelligentsia.’ In this
trial, we shall be concerned with the judgment of history on the
activity of the Russian intelligentsia” and with the verdict of
the Revolution on it.

The narrow limits of our investigation prevent our compre-
hending exactly the particular manner in which the representa-
tives of revolutionary socialism were taking under consideration
the fate of the so-called intelligentsia and what specifically they
were planning for it. However, we take comfort in the fact that
these materials have been published, that they are accessible to
everyone, and that they can be assembled in any required detail.
Therefore, solely to understand the over-all atmosphere of the
Republic, we shall recall the opinion of the Chairman of the
Council of People’s Commissars in the years when all these
tribunal sessions were going on.

55. Krylenko, op. cit., p. 34.

328 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

In a letter to Gorky on September 15, 1919—which we have
already cited—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin replied to Gorky’s attempts
to intercede in the arrests of members of the intelligentsia, among
them, evidently, some of the defendants in this trial, and, com-
menting on the bulk of the Russian intelligentsia ‘of those years
(the “close-to-the-Cadets intelligentsia”), he wrote: “In actual
fact they are not [the nation’s] brains, but shit.”°* On another
occasion he said to Gorky: “If we break too many pots, it will be
its [the intelligentsia’s] fault.”°’ If the intelligentsia wants justice,
why doesn’t it come over to us? “I’ve gotten one bullet from the
intelligentsia myself.”°* (In other words, from Kaplan.)

On the basis of these feelings, he expressed his mistrust and
hostility toward the intelligentsia: rotten-liberal; “pious”; “the
slovenliness so customary among ‘educated’ people”; he be-
lieved the intelligentsia was always shortsighted, that it had
betrayed the cause of the workers. (But when had the intel-
ligentsia ever sworn loyalty to the cause of the workers, the
dictatorship of the workers?)

This mockery of the intelligentsia, this contempt for the intel-
ligentsia, was subsequently adopted with enthusiasm by the
publicists and the newspapers of the twenties and was absorbed
into the current of day-to-day life. And in the end, the members
of the intelligentsia accepted it too, cursing their eternal thought-
lessness, their eternal duality, their eternal spinelessness, and
their hopeless lagging behind the times.

And this was just! The voice of the accusing power echoed
and re-echoed beneath the vaults of the Verkhtrib, returning
us to the defendants’ bench.

“This social stratum .. . has, during recent years, undergone
the trial of universal re-evaluation.” Yes, yes, re-evaluation, as
was so often said at the time. And how did that re-evaluation
occur? Here’s how: “The Russian intelligentsia which entered the
crucible of the Revolution with slogans of power for the people
[so, it had something to it after all!] emerged from it an ally of
the black [not even White!] generals, and a hired [!] and obedient

56. Lenin, fifth edition, Vol. 51, p. 48.

57 V. I. Lenin i A. M. Gorky (V. I. Lenin and A. M. Gorky), Moscow,
Academy of Sciences Publishing House, 1961, p. 263.

58. Ibid.
59. Lenin, fourth edition, Vol. 26, p. 373.

The Law:as a Child | 329

agent of European imperialism. The intelligentsia trampled on
its own banners [as in. the army, yes?]: and covered them with
mud.”®°

How, indeed, can we not.cry out. our: hearts in repentance?
How can we not lacerate our: chests: with our. fingernails?

And the only reason why “there.is no need to deal out the
death blow to its individual representatives” is that “this social
group has outlived its time.”®

Here, at the start of the twentieth century! What power of
foresight! Oh, scientific revolutionaries! (However, the intel-
ligentsia had to be finished off anyway. Throughout the twenties
they kept finishing them off and finishing them off.)

We examine with hostility the twenty-eight individual allies of
the black generals, the hirelings of European imperialism. And
we are especially aroused by the stench of the word Center. Now
we see a Tactical Center, now a National Center, and now a
Right Center. (And in our recollection of the trials of two
decades, Centers keep creeping in all the time, Centers and
Centers, Engineers’ Centers, Menshevik Centers, Trotskyite-
Zinovievite Centers, Rightist-Bukharinite Centers, but all of them
are crushed, all crushed, and that is the only reason you and I are
still alive.) Wherever there is a Center, of course, the hand of
imperialism can be found.

True, we feel a measure of relief when we learn that the
Tactical Center on this occasion was not an organization; that it
did not have: (1), statutes; (2) a program; (3) membership
dues. So, what did: it have? Here’s what: They used to meet!
(Goose-pimples up and: down the: back!!). And when they met,
they undertook to familiarize themselves with one another’s point
of view! (Icy chills!)

The charges were extremely serious and were supported by
the evidence. There were two (2) pieces of evidence to cor-
roborate the charges against twenty-eight accused individuals.”
These were two letters from people who were not present in court
because they were abroad: Myakotin and Fyodorov. They were
absent, but until the October Revolution they had been members

60. Krylenko, op. cit., p. 54.
61. Ibid., p. 38.
62. Ibid.

330 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

of the same committees as those who were present, a circum-
stance that gave us the right to equate those who were absent
with those who were present. And their letters dealt with their
disagreements with Denikin on certain trivial questions: the
peasant question (we are not told what these differences were,
but they were evidently advising Denikin to give the land to the
peasants); the Jewish question (they were evidently advising him
not to return to the previous restrictions) ; the federated nationali-
ties question (enough said: clear); the question of the structure
of the government (democracy rather than dictatorship); and
similar matters. And what conclusion did this evidence suggest?
Very simple. It proved the fact of correspondence, and it also
proved the agreement, the unanimity, of those present with
Denikin! (Grrr! Grrrr!)

But there were also direct accusations against those present:
that they had exchanged information with acquaintances who
lived in outlying areas (Kiev, for example) which were not under
the control of the central Soviet authorities! In other words, this
used to be Russia, let’s say, but then in the interests of world
revolution we ceded this one piece to Germany. And people
continued to exchange letters. How are you doing there, Ivan
Ivanich? Here’s how things are going with us. N. M. Kishkin,
a member of the Central Committee of the Cadets, was so brazen
as to try to justify himself right from the defendants’ bench: “A
man doesn’t want to be blind. He tries to find out everything he
can about what’s going on everywhere.”

To find out everything about what’s going on everywhere? He
doesn’t want to be blind? Well, all one can say is that the accuser
correctly described their actions as treason, treason to Soviet
power!

But their most heinous acts were something else again. In the
midst of the Civil War they wrote books, composed memoranda
and projects. Yes, as experts in constitutional law, financial
science, economic relationships, the system of justice, and educa-
tion, they wrote works! (And, as one might easily guess, their
works were not based on earlier works by Lenin, Trotsky, and
Bukharin.) Professor Kotlyarevsky wrote on the federal struc-
ture of Russia; V. I. Stempkovsky on the agrarian question (no
doubt, without collectivization); V. S. Muralevich on education
in the future Russia; N. N. Vinogradsky on economics. And the

The Law as a Child | 331

(great) biologist N. K. Koltsov (who never received anything
from the Motherland except persecution and execution) allowed
all those bourgeois big shots to get together in his institute for
their discussions. (N. D. Kondratyev was included here also.
In 1931 he was condemned once and for all in connection with
TKP—the fictitious Working Peasants Party.)

Our accuser’s heart jumps right out of our chest, outrunning
the sentence. Well, what punishment was adequate for these as-
sistants to the general? Just one, of course—to be shot! That was
not merely what the accuser demanded—it was the sentence of
the tribunal. (Alas, it was later commuted to concentration camp
until the end of the Civil War.)

And indeed the defendants’ guilt consisted in the fact that
they hadn’t sat in their own corners, sucking on their quarter-
pound of bread; that “they had talked things over and reached
agreements as to what the state structure should be after the fall
of the Soviet regime.”

In contemporary scientific language, this is known as the study
of the alternative possibility.

The voice of the accuser thundered, but we hear some kind
of crack in it. As if his eyes were searching the rostrum, looking
for another piece of paper? A quotation, perhaps? Give it to
him on tiptoe, quick, quick! Give him one at random! From some
other trial? It’s not important! Wasn’t this the one, Nikolai
Vasilyevich Krylenko?

“For us . . . the concept of torture inheres in the very fact of
holding political prisoners in prison... .”

So that’s it! It is torture to keep political prisoners in prison!
And the accuser said so! What a generous view! A new jurispru-
dence is arising! And further:

“, . . Struggle against the Tsarist government was second
nature to them [the politicals] and not to struggle against Tsarism
was something of which they were incapable.”®

What’s that? They were incapable of not studying alternative
possibilities? Perhaps thinking was first nature to the intellectual?

Alas, through stupidity, they had shoved the wrong quotation
at him. Now wasn’t that a mix-up for you! But Nikolai Vasilyevich
was already off to the races.

“And even if the defendants here in Moscow did not lift a

63. Ibid., p. 17.

332 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

finger [and it looks very much as though that’s the way it was]
at such a moment, nevertheless . . . even a conversation over a
teacup as to the kind of system that should replace the Soviet
system, which is allegedly about to fall, is a counterrevolutionary
act. . . . During the Civil War not only is any kind of action
[against Soviet power] a crime . . . but the fact of inaction is also
criminal.”

Well, now everything is comprehensible, everything is clear.
They are being sentenced to death—for inaction. For a cup of
tea.

The Petrograd intellectuals, for example, decided that in the
event of Yudenich’s taking the city, they would first of all “con-
cern themselves with convening a democratic municipal Duma.”
(In other words, to safeguard the city against a possible dictator-
ship.)

Krylenko: “I would like to shout at them: ‘It was your duty
to think first of all how you might die in battle, so as not to allow
Yudenich into the city!’ ”

But they didn’t die in battle.

(Nor, in fact, did Nikolai Vasilyevich Krylenko.)

In addition, there were certain defendants who knew about
all this talk and yet kept silent, did not write denunciations. (In
our contemporary lingo: “He knew, but he didn’t tell.”)

And here is another real example not merely of inaction but
of actively criminal action. Through L. N. Khrushcheva, a
member of the Political Red Cross (and there she was, on the
defendants’ bench), some of the other defendants had raised
money to help the Butyrki prisoners. (One can just picture that
flood of capital—pouring into the prison commissary!) And they
had supplied various articles too. (Yes, indeed. Just look.
Woolens, too, perhaps?)

There were no bounds to their evil- -doing! Nor would there be
any limits to their proletarian punishment!

As when a cinema projector starts slowing down, twenty-eight
prerevolutionary male and female faces flicker past us in a film
that’s fuzzy and askew. We didn’t notice their expressions! Were
they frightened? Contemptuous? Proud?

We don’t have their answers! Their last words are missing—

64. Ibid.

The Law as a Child | 333

because of “technical considerations.” But, making up for this
lack, the accuser croons to us: “From beginning to end, it was
self-flagellation and repentance for the mistakes they committed.
The political instability and the interim nature of the intel-
ligentsia . . . [yes, yes, here comes another one: interim nature]
completely justified that Marxist evaluation of the intelligentsia
made by the Bolsheviks.”

I don’t know. Perhaps they did engage in self-flagellation.
Perhaps they didn’t. Perhaps the passion to save one’s life at any
cost had already come into being. Perhaps the old dignity of
the intelligentsia had still been maintained. . . . I don’t know.

Who was that young woman flashing past?

That was Tolstoi’s daughter, Alexandra. Krylenko asked her:
“What did you do during these conversations?” And she an-
swered: “I attended to the samovar.” Three years of concentra-
tion camp!

And who was that man over there? His face was familiar. It
was Savva Morozov. But listen here: after all, he gave the
Bolsheviks all that money! And now he has handed a little to
these people? Three years in prison, but released on probation.
Let that be a lesson to him!®

And that’s how the sun of our freedom rose. It was as just
such a well-nourished little imp that our Octobrist child—-Law—
began to grow.

Today we don’t remember this at all.

65. Ibid., p. 8.
-66. He would soon cut his own throat.

Chapter 9

The Law Becomes a Man

Our review has already grown. Yet we have in fact hardly
begun. All the big and famous trials are still ahead of us. But
their basic lines have already been indicated.

So let us stick with our Law while it is still in its boy scout
stage.

Let us recall one long-forgotten case which was not even
political.

F. The Case of Glavtop—May, 1921

This case was important because it involved engineers—or,
as they had been christened in the terminology of the times,
“specialists,” or spetsy. (Glavtop was the Main Fuels Committee. )

Nineteen twenty-one was the most difficult of all the four
winters of the Civil War; nothing was left for fuel, and trains
simply couldn’t get to the next station; and there were cold and
famine in the capitals, and a wave of strikes in the factories—
strikes which, incidentally, have been completely wiped out of
our history books by now. Who was to blame? That was a famous
question: Who is to blame?

Well, obviously, not the Over-All Leadership. And not even
the local leadership. That was important. If the “comrades who
were often brought in from outside”—1.e., the Communist leaders
—did not have a correct grasp of the business at hand, then it was

334

The Law Becomesa Man | 335

the engineers, or spetsy, who were supposed to “outline for them
the correct approach to the problem.”* And this meant that “it
was not the leaders who were to blame. . . . Those who had
worked out the calculations were to blame, those who had re-
figured the calculations, those who had calculated the plan”—
which consisted of how to produce food and heat with zeros.
Those to blame weren’t the ones who compelled but the ones
who calculated! If the planning turned out to be inflated, the
spetsy were the ones to blame. Because the figures did not jibe,
“this was the fault of the spetsy, not of the Council of Labor and
Defense” and “not even of the responsible men in charge of
Glavtop—the Main Fuels Committee.”

If there was no coal, firewood, or petroleum, it was because
the spetsy had “brought about a mixed-up, chaotic situation.”
And it was their own fault that they hadn’t resisted the urgent
telephonograms from Rykov and the government—and had
issued and allotted fuels outside the scope of the plan.

The spetsy were to blame for everything. But the proletarian
court was not merciless with them. Their sentences were lenient.
Of course, an inner hostility to those cursed spetsy remains in
proletarian hearts—but one can’t get along without them; every-
thing goes to rack and ruin. And the tribunal doesn’t persecute
them, and Krylenko even says that from 1920 on “there is no
question of any sabotage.” The spetsy are to blame, but not
out of malice on their part; it’s simply because they are inept;
they aren’t able to do any better; under capitalism, they hadn’t
learned to work, or else they were simply egotists and bribe-takers.

And so, at the beginning of the reconstruction period, a sur-
prising tendency toward leniency could be observed in regard to
the engineers.

The year 1922, the first year of peace, was rich in public trials,
so rich that almost this entire chapter will be devoted to that
year alone. (People are surprised: the war has ended, and yet
there is an increase in court activity? But in 1945, too, and in
1948, the Dragon became very, very energetic. Is there not, per-
haps, a simple sort of law in this?)

1. Krylenko, Za Pyat Let, p. 381.
2. Ibid., pp. 382-383.

336 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

Although in December, 1921, the Ninth Congress of the
Soviets decreed that the authority of the Cheka be narrowed?
. and, in consequence, its authority was indeed narrowed and it
was renamed the GPU, as early as October, 1922, the powers
of the GPU were broadened again, and in December Dzerzhinsky
told a Pravda correspondent: “Now we need to keep watch
with particular vigilance over anti-Soviet currents and group-
ings. The GPU has reduced its pipera but strengthened it in
terms of quality.”*

And, at the beginning of 1922, we must not bypass:

G. The Case of the Suicide of Engineer Oldenborger
(Tried before the Verkhtrib—the Supreme Tribunal
—in February, 1922)

This case is forgotten, insignificant, and totally atypical. It
was atypical because its entire scale was that of a single life that
had already ended. And if that life hadn’t ended, it would have
been that very engineer, yes, and ten more with him, forming a
Center, who would have sat before the Verkhtrib; in that event
the case would have been altogether typical. But as it was, an
outstanding Party comrade, Sedelnikov, sat on the defendants’
bench and, with him, two members of the RKJ—the Workers’
. and Peasants’ Inspection—and two trade-union officials.

But, like Chekhov’s far-off broken harp-string, there was
something plaintive in this trial; it was, in its own way, an early
predecessor of the Shakhty and Promparty trials.

V. V. Oldenborger had worked for thirty years in the Moscow
water-supply system and had evidently become its chief engineer
back at the beginning of the century. Even though the Silver
Age of art, four State Dumas, three wars, and three revolutions
had come and gone, all Moscow drank Oldenborger’s water. The
Acmeists and the Futurists, the reactionaries and the revolution-
aries, the military cadets and the Red Guards, the Council of
People’s Commissars, the Cheka, and the Workers’ and Peasants’
Inspection—all had drunk Oldenborger’s pure cold water. He
had never married and he had no children. His whole life had
consisted of that one water-supply system. In 1905 he refused

3. Sobraniye Uzakonenii RSFSR (Collection of Decrees of the R.S.F.S.R.),

1922, No. 4, p. 42.
4, Pravda, December 17, 1922.

The Law Becomes a Man | 337

to permit the soldiers of the guard near the water-supply conduits
—“because the soldiers, out of clumsiness, might break the pipes
or machinery.” On the second day of the February Revolution
he said to his workers that that was enough, the revolution was
over, and they should all go back to their jobs; the water must
flow. And during the October fighting in Moscow, he had only
one concern: to safeguard the water-supply system. His col-
leagues went on strike in answer to the Bolshevik coup d’état
and invited him to take part in the strike with them. His reply
was: “On the operational side, please forgive me, I am not on
strike. . . . In everything else, I—well, yes, I am on strike.” He
accepted money for the strikers from the strike committee, and
gave them a receipt, but he himself dashed off to get a sleeve to
repair a broken pipe.

But -despite this, he was an enemy! Here’s what he had said
to one of the workers: “The Soviet regime won’t last two weeks.”
(There was a new political situation preceding the announcement
of the New Economic Policy, and in this context Krylenko could
allow himself some frank talk before the Verkhtrib: “It was not
only the spetsy who thought that way at the time. That is what
we ourselves thought more than once.” )

But despite this, Oldenborger was an enemy! Just as Comrade
‘Lenin ‘had told us: to keep watch over the bourgeois specialists
we need a watchdog—the RKI—the Workers’ and Peasants’
Inspection.

They began by assigning two such watchdogs to Oldenborger
on a full-time basis. (One of them, Makarov-Zemlyansky, a
swindler and a former clerk in the water system, had been fired
“for improper conduct” and had entered the service of the RKI
“because they paid better.” He got promoted to the Central
People’s Commissariat because “the pay there was even better”—
and, from that height, he had returned to check up on his former
chief and take hearty vengeance on the man who had wronged
him.) Then, of course, the local Party committee—that match-
less defender of the workers’ interests—wasn’t dozing either. And
Communists were put in charge of the water system. “Only
workers are to hold the top positions; there are to be only
Communists at leadership level; and ithe wisdom of ‘this view was
confirmed by the given trial.”

5. Krylenko, op. cit.; p. 433.

338 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

The Moscow Party organization also kept its eyes on the water-
supply system. (And behind it stood the Cheka.) “In our own
time we built our army on the basis of a healthy feeling of class
enmity; in its name, we do not entrust even one responsible posi-
tion to people who do not belong to our camp, without assigning
them . . . a commissar.” And so, they all immediately began to
order the chief engineer about, to supervise him, to give him
instructions, and to shift the engineering personnel around with-
out his knowledge. (“They broke up the whole nest of business-
men.” )

But they did not, even so, safeguard the water-supply system.
Things didn’t go better with it, but worse! So slyly had that gang
of engineers contrived to carry out an evil scheme. Even more:
overcoming his intellectual’s interim nature, as a result of which
he had never in his life expressed himself sharply, Oldenborger
made so bold as to describe as stupid stubbornness the actions
of the new chief of the water-supply system, Zenyuk (to Kry-
lenko, “a profoundly likable person on the basis of his internal
structure”).

It was at this point that it became clear that “engineer Olden-
borger was consciously betraying the interests of the workers and
that he was a direct and open enemy of the dictatorship of the
working class.” They started bringing inspection commissions
into the water-supply system, but the commissions found that
everything was in good order and that water was being supplied
on a normal basis. The RKI men, the “rabkrinovtsy,” refused to `
be satisfied with this. They kept pouring report after report into
the RKI. Oldenborger simply wanted to “ruin, spoil, break down
the water-supply system for political purposes,” but he was unable
to. Well, they put what obstacles in his way that they could;
they prevented wasteful boiler repairs and replacing the wooden
tanks with concrete ones. At meetings of the water-supply-system
workers, the leaders began saying openly that their chief engineer
was the “soul of organized technical sabotage” and that he
should not be believed, that he should be resisted at every point.

Despite all this, the operation of the water-supply system not
only didn’t improve, but deteriorated.

What was particularly offensive to the “hereditary proletarian

6. Ibid., p. 434.

The Law Becomes a Man | 339

psychology” of the officials of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspec-
tion and of the trade unions was that the majority of the workers
at the pumping stations “had been infected with petty-bourgeois
psychology” and, unable to recognize Oldenborger’s sabotage, had
come to his defense. At this point, elections to the Moscow Soviet
were being held and the workers nominated Oldenborger as the
candidate of the water-supply system, against whom, of course,
the Party cell backed its own Party candidate. However, this
turned out to be futile because of the chief engineer’s fraudulent
authority with the workers. Nonetheless, the Party cell brought up
the question with the District Party Committee, on all levels, and
announced at a general meeting that “Oldenborger is the center
and soul of sabotage, and will be our political enemy in the
Moscow Soviet!” The workers responded with an uproar and
shouts of “Untrue! Lies!” And at that point the secretary of the
Party Committee, Comrade Sedelnikov, flung right in the faces
of the thousand-headed proletariat there: “I am not even going
to talk to such Black Hundred, reactionary pogrom-makers.”
That is to say: We’ll talk to you somewhere else.

Party measures were also taken: they expelled the chief
engineer from—no less—the collegium for administration of the
water system, and kept him under constant investigation; con-
tinually summoned him before a multitude of commissions and
subcommissions; kept interrogating him and giving him as-
signments that were to be urgently carried out. Every time he
failed to appear, it was entered in the record “in case of a future
trial.” And through the Council of Labor and Defense (Chair-
man—Comrade Lenin) they got an “Extraordinary Troika”
appointed to the water system. (It consisted of representatives of
the RKI, the Council of Trade Unions, and Comrade Kuibyshev. )

And for the fourth year the water kept right on flowing through
the pipes. And Moscovites kept on drinking it and didn’t notice
anything wrong. |

Then Comrade Sedelnikov wrote an article for the newspaper
Ekonomicheskaya Zhizn: “In view of the rumors disturbing the
public in regard to the catastrophic state of the water mains .. .”
and he reported many new and alarming rumors—even that the
water system was pumping water underground and was intention-
ally washing away the foundations of all Moscow.” (Set there
by Ivan Kalita in the fourteenth century.) They summoned a

340 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

Commission of the Moscow Soviet. The Commission found that.
the “state of the water system was satisfactory and that its techni-
cal direction was efficient.” Oldenborger denied all the accusa-
tions. And then Sedelnikov placidly declared: “I had set myself
the task of stirring up a fuss about this matter in order to get the
question of the spetsy taken up.”

What remained for the leaders of the workers to do at this
point? What was the final, infallible method? A denunciation to
the Cheka! Sedelnikov resorted to just that! He “painted a picture
of the conscious wrecking of the water system by Oldenborger.”
He did not have the slightest doubt that “a counterrevolutionary
organization” existed “in the water system, in the heart of Red
Moscow.” And, furthermore, a catastrophic situation at the
Rublevo water tower!

At this point, Oldenborger was guilty of a tactless act of rude-
ness, the outburst of a spineless, interim intellectual. They had
refused to authorize his order for new boilers from abroad—
and at the time, in Russia, it was quite impossible to fix the old
ones. So Oldenborger committed suicide. (It had been just too
much for one man—after all, he hadn’t undergone the condition-
ing for that sort of thing.)

The cause was not lost, however. They could find a counter-
revolutionary organization without him. RKI men would now
undertake to expose the whole thing. Some coricealed maneuver-
ing went on for two months. But such was the spirit at the
beginning of the NEP that “a lesson had to be taught both one
side and the other.” So there was a trial in the Supreme Tribunal.
Krylenko was moderately severe. Krylenko was moderately merci-
less. He was understanding: “The Russian worker, of course, was
right to see in every person not of his own class someone more
likely to be an enemy than a friend.”” Nevertheless: “Given
the further change in our practical and general policy, perhaps
we must be prepared for still greater concessions, for retreating
and maneuvering. Perhaps the Party will be forced to adopt a
tactical program of action which the primitive logic of honest,
dedicated warriors is going to protest.”®

Well, it’s a fact, the workers who testified against Comrade

7. Ibid., p. 435.
8. Ibid., p. 438,

The Law Becomesa Man | 341

Sedelnikov and the RKI men were “easily brushed off” by the
tribunal. And the defendant Sedelnikov replied brazenly to the
threats of the accuser. “Comrade Krylenko! I know all those
articles. But after all, no one is judging class enemies here, and
those articles relate to class enemies.”

However, Krylenko laid it on good and thick. Deliberately
false denunciations to state institutions . . . in circumstances
ageravating guilt, such as a personal grudge and the settling of
personal accounts . . . the abuse of an official position . . . political
irresponsibility . . . abuse of power and of the authority of govern-
ment officials and members of the Russian Communist Party
(Bolsheviks) . . . disorganization of the work of the water-
supply system . . . injury done the Moscow Soviet and Soviet
Russia, because there were few such specialists, and it was im-
possible to find replacements for them. “And we won't even
begin to speak of the individual, personal loss. . . . In our time,
when struggle is the chief content of our lives, we have somehow
grown used to not counting these irrevocable losses.”® The
Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal must utter its weighty word:
“Punishment must be assessed with all due severity! ... We
didn’t come here just to crack jokes.”

Good Lord, now what are they going to get? Could it really
be? My reader has gotten used to prompting: all of them to be
sh !

And that is absolutely correct. All of them were to be
publicly shamed—bearing in mind their sincere repentance! All
of them to be sentenced to—ostracism and ridicule.

Two truths...

And Sedelnikov, allegedly, got one year in jail.

You will just have to forgive me if I don’t believe it.

Oh, you bards of the twenties, painting your pictures of their
bright and bubbling happiness! Even those who touched only their
farthest edge, who touched them only in childhood, will never
forget them. And those plug-uglies, those fat faces, busy per-
secuting engineers—in the twenties, too, they ate their bellies full.

And now we see also that they had been busy from 1918 on.

9. Ibid., p. 458.

342 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

In the two trials following we will take leave of our favorite
supreme accuser for a while: he is occupied with his preparations
for the major trial of the SR’s.*° This spectacular trial aroused a
great deal of emotion in Europe beforehand, and the People’s
Commissariat of Justice was suddenly taken aback: after all, we
had been trying people for four years without any code, neither
a new one nor an old one. And in all probability Krylenko him-
self was concerned about the code too. Everything had to be
neatly tied up ahead of time.

The coming church trials were internal. They didn’t interest
progressive Europe. And they could be conducted without a code.

We have already had an opportunity to observe that the separa-
tion of church and state was so construed by the state that the
churches themselves and everything that hung in them, was in-
stalled in them and painted in them, belonged to the state, and
the only church remaining was that church which, in accordance
with the Scriptures, lay within the heart. And in 1918, when
political victory seemed to have been attained faster and more
easily than had been expected, they had pressed right on to con-
fiscate church property. However, this leap had aroused too
fierce a wave of popular indignation. In the heat of the Civil
War, it was not very intelligent to create, in addition, an internal
front against the believers. And it proved necessary to postpone
for the time being the dialogue between the Communists and the
Christians.

At the end of the Civil War, and as its natural consequence,
an unprecedented famine developed in the Volga area. They give
it only two lines in the official histories because it doesn’t add a
very ornamental touch to the wreaths of the victors in that war.
But the famine existed nonetheless—to the point of cannibalism,
to the point at which parents ate their own children—such a
famine as even Russia had never known, even in the Time of
Troubles in the early seventeenth century. (Because at that time,
as the historians testify, unthreshed ricks of grain survived intact

10. The provincial trials of the SR’s took place even earlier, such as the
one in Saratov in 1919.

The Law Becomesa Man | 343

beneath the snow and ice for several years.) Just one film about
famine might throw a new light on everything we saw and
everything we know about the Revolution and the Civil War.
But there are no films and no novels and no statistical re-
search—the effort is to forget it. It does not embellish. Besides,
we have come to blame the kulaks as the cause of every famine—
and just who were the kulaks in the midst of such collective
death? V. G. Korolenko, in his Letters to Lunacharsky (which,
despite Lunacharsky’s promise, were never officially published
in the Soviet Union),"' explains to us Russia’s total, epidemic
descent into famine and destitution. It was the result of pro-
ductivity having been reduced to zero (the working hands
were all carrying guns) and the result, also, of the peasants’
utter lack of trust and hope that even the smallest part of the
harvest might be left for them. Yes, and someday someone will
also count up those many carloads of food supplies rolling on and
on for many, many months to Imperial Germany, under the
terms of the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk—from a Russia which
had been deprived of a protesting voice, from the very provinces
where famine would strike—so that Germany could fight to the
end in the West.

There was a direct, immediate chain of cause and effect. The
Volga peasants had to eat their children because we were so
impatient about putting up with the Constituent Assembly.

But political genius lies in extracting success even from the
people’s ruin. A brilliant idea was born: after all, three billiard
balls can be pocketed with one shot. So now let the priests feed
the Volga region! They are Christians. They are generous!

1. If they refuse, we will blame the whole famine on them
and destroy the church.

2. If they agree, we will clean out the churches.

3. In either case, we will replenish our stocks of foreign ex-
change and precious metals.

Yes, and the idea was probably inspired by the actions of the
church itself. As Patriarch Tikhon himself had testified, back in
August, 1921, at the beginning of the famine, the church had

11. Published in Paris in 1922, and in the Soviet Union in samizdat in 1967.

344 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

created diocesan and all-Russian committees for aid to the starv-
ing and had begun to collect funds. But to have permitted any
direct help to go straight from the church into the mouths of
those who were starving would have undermined the dictatorship
of the proletariat. The committees were banned, and the funds
they had collected were confiscated and turned over to the state
treasury. The Patriarch had also appealed to the Pope in Rome
and to the Archbishop of Canterbury for assistance—but he was
rebuked for this, too, on the grounds that only the Soviet au-
thorities had the right to enter into discussions with foreigners.
Yes, indeed. And what was there to be alarmed about? The news-
papers wrote that the government itself had all the necessary
means to cope with the famine.

Meanwhile, in the Volga region they were eating grass, the
soles of shoes, and gnawing at door jambs. And, finally, in Decem-
ber, 1921, Pomgol—the State Commission for Famine Relief
—proposed that the churches help the starving by donating church
valuables—not all, but those not required for liturgical rites.
The Patriarch agreed. Pomgol issued a directive: all gifts must
be strictly voluntary! On Febraury 19, 1922, the Patriarch issued
a pastoral letter permitting the parish councils to make gifts of
objects that did not have liturgical and ritual significance.

And in this way matters could again have simply degenerated
into a compromise that would have frustrated the will of the
proletariat, just as it once had been by the Constituent Assembly,
and still was in all the chatterbox European parliaments.

The thought came in a stroke of lightning! The thought came—
and a decree followed! A decree of the All-Russian Central Execu-
tive Committee on February 26: all valuables were to be requisi-
tioned from the churches—for the starving!

The Patriarch wrote to Kalinin, who did not reply. Then on
February 28 the Patriarch issued a new, fateful pastoral letter:
from the church’s point of view such a measure is sacrilege, and
we cannot approve the requisition.

From the distance of a half-century, it is easy to reproach the
Patriarch. Of course, the leaders of the Christian church ought
not to have been distracted by wondering whether other resources
might not be available to the Soviet government, and who it was
who had driven the Volga to famine. They ought not to have

The Law Becomes a Man | 345

clung to those treasures, since the possibility of a new fortress of
faith arising—if it existed at all—did not depend on them. But
one has also to picture the situation of that unfortunate Patriarch,
not elected to his post until after the October Revolution, who had
for a few short years led a church that was always persecuted,
restricted, under fire, and whose preservation had been entrusted
to him.

But right then and there a sure-fire campaign of persecution
began in the papers, directed against the Patriarch and high
church authorities who were strangling the Volga region with the
bony hand of famine. And the more firmly the Patriarch clung to
his position, the weaker it became. In March a movement to re-
linquish the valuables, to come to an agreement with the govern-
ment, began even among the clergy. Their still undispelled qualms
were expressed to Kalinin by Bishop Antonin Granovsky, a mem-
ber of the Central Committee of Pomgol: “The believers fear that
the church valuables may be used for other purposes, more
limited and alien to their hearts.” (Knowing the general principles
of our Progressive Doctrine, the experienced reader will agree that
this was indeed very probable. After all, the Comintern’s needs
and those of the East in the course of being liberated were no less
acute than those of the Volga.)

The Petrograd Metropolitan, Veniamin, was similarly impelled
by a mood of trust: “This belongs to God and we will give all of
it by ourselves.” But forced requisitions were wrong. Let the
sacrifice be of our own free will. He, too, wanted verification by
the clergy and the believers: to watch over the church valuables
up to the very moment when they were transformed into bread for
the starving. And in all this he was tormented lest he violate the
censuring will of the Patriarch.

In Petrograd things seemed to be working out peacefully. The
atmosphere at the session of the Petrograd Pomgol on March 5,
1922, was even joyful, according to the testimony of an eye-
witness. Veniamin announced: “The Orthodox Church is pre-
pared to give everything to help the starving.” It saw sacrilege
only in forced requisition. But in that case requisition was un-
necessary! Kanatchikov, Chairman of the Petrograd Pomgol,
gave his assurances that this would produce a favorable attitude
toward the church on the part of the Soviet government. (Not

346 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

very likely, that!) In a burst of good feeling, everyone stood up.
The Metropolitan said: “The heaviest burden is division and
enmity. But the time will come when the Russian people will
unite. I myself, at the head of the worshipers, will remove the
cover [of precious metals and precious stones] from the ikon of
the Holy Virgin of Kazan. I will shed sweet tears on it and give
it away.” He gave his blessing to the Bolshevik members of
Pomgol and they saw him to the door with bared heads. The
newspaper Petrogradskaya Pravda, in its issues of March 8, 9,
and 10,” confirmed the peaceful, successful outcome of the talks,
and spoke favorably of the Metropolitan. “In Smolny they agreed
that the church vessels and ikon coverings would be melted down
into ingots in the presence of the believers.”

Again things were getting fouled up with some kind of com-
promise! The noxious fumes of Christianity were poisoning the
revolutionary will. That kind of unity and that way of handing
over the valuables were not what the starving people of the Volga
needed! The spineless membership of the Petrograd Pomgol was
changed. The newspapers began to howl about the “evil pastors”
and “princes of the church,” and the representatives of the church
were told: “We don’t need your donations! And there wont be
any negotiations with you! Everything belongs to the government
—and the government will take whatever it considers necessary.”

And so forcible requisitions, accompanied by strife, began in
Petrograd, as they did everywhere else.

And this provided the legal basis for initiating trials of the
clergy.*®

H. The Moscow Church Trial—April 26-May 7, 1922

This took place in the Polytechnic Museum. The court was the
Moscow Revtribunal, under Presiding Judge Bek; the prosecutors
were Lunin and Longinov. There were seventeen defendants,
including archpriests and laymen, accused of disseminating the
Patriarch’s proclamation. This charge was more important than

12. See the articles entitled “Tserkov i Golod” (“The Church and the
Famine”) and “Kak budut izyaty tserkovnye tsennosti” (“How the Church
Valuables Will Be Requisitioned”).

13. I have taken this material from Ocherki po Istorii Tserkovnoi Smuty
(Essays on the History of the Troubles of the Church), by Anatoly Levitin,
Part I, samizdat, 1962, and from the stenographic notes on the questioning of
Patriarch Tikhon, Trial Record, Vol. V.

The Law Becomesa Man | 347

the question of surrendering, or not surrendering, church valu-
ables. Archpriest A. N. Zaozersky had surrendered all the
valuables in his own church, but he defended in principle the
Patriarch’s appeal regarding forced requisition as sacrilege, and
he became the central personage in the trial—and would shortly
be shot. (All of which went to prove that what was important was
not to feed the starving but to make use of a convenient opportu-
nity to break the back of the church.)

On May 5 Patriarch Tikhon was summoned to the tribunal as
a witness. Even though the public was represented only by a
carefully selected audience (1922, in this respect, differing little
from 1937 and 1968), nonetheless the stamp of Old Russia was
still so deep, and the Soviet stamp was still so superficial, that on
the Patriarch’s entrance more than half of those present rose to
receive his blessing.

Tikhon took on himself the entire blame for writing and dis-
seminating his appeal. The presiding judge of the tribunal tried
to elicit a different line of testimony from him: “But it isn’t pos-
sible! Did you really write it in your own hand? All the lines?
You probably just signed it. And who actually wrote it? And who
were your advisers?” and then: “Why did you mention in the
appeal the persecution to which the newspapers are subjecting
you? [After all, they are persecuting you and why should we
hear about it?] What did you want to express?”

The Patriarch: “That is something you will have to ask the
people who started the persecution: What objectives were they
pursuing?”

The Presiding Judge: “But that after all has nothing to do with
religion!”

The Patriarch: “It has historical significance.”

The Presiding Judge: “Referring to the fact that the decree was
published while you were in the midst of talks with Pomgol, you
used the expression, behind your back?”

The Patriarch: “Yes.”

Presiding Judge: “You therefore consider that the Soviet gov-
ernment acted incorrectly?”

A crushing argument! It will be repeated a million times more
in the nighttime offices of interrogators! And we will never answer
as simply and straightforwardly as:

The Patriarch: “Yes.”

348 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

The Presiding Judge: “Do you consider the state’s laws ob-
ligatory or not?”

The Patriarch: “Yes, I recognize them, to the extent that they
do not contradict the rules of piety.”

(Oh, if only everyone had answered just that way! Our whole
history would have been different. )

A debate about church law followed. The Patriarch explained
that if the church itself surrendered its valuables, it was not
sacrilege. But if they were taken away against the church’s will,
it was. His appeal had not prohibited giving the valuables at all,
but had only declared that seizing them against the will of the
church was to be condemned.

(But that’s what we wanted—expropriation against the will
of the church! )

Comrade Bek, the presiding judge, was astounded: “Which in
the last analysis is more important to you—the laws of the church
or the point of view of the Soviet government?”

(The expected reply: “The Soviet government.” )

“Very well; so it was sacrilege according to the laws of the
church,” exclaimed the accuser, “but what was it from the point
of view of mercy?”

(For the first and last time—for another fifty years—that banal
word mercy was spoken before a tribunal.)

Then there was a philological analysis. of the word “svyato-
tatstvo,” meaning “sacrilege,” derived from “svyato,” meaning
“holy,” and “tat,” meaning “thief.”

The Accuser: “So that means that we, the representatives of
the Soviet government, are thieves of holy things?”

(A prolonged uproar in the hall. A recess. The bailiffs at
work. )

The Accuser: “So you call the representatives of the Soviet
government, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee,
thieves?”

The Patriarch: “I am citing only church law.”

Then there is a discussion of the term “blasphemy.” While they
were requisitioning the valuables from the church of St. Basil
the Great of Caesarea, the ikon cover would not fit into a box,
and at that point they trampled it with their feet. But the Patri-
arch himself had not been present.

The Law Becomesa Man | 349

The Accuser: “How do you know that? Give us the name of
the priest who told you that. [And we will arrest him immedi-
ately!]”

The Patriarch does not give the name.

That means it was a lie!

The Accuser presses on triumphantly: “No, who spread that
repulsive slander?”

The Presiding Judge: “Give us the names of those who
trampled the ikon cover! [One can assume that after doing it they
left their visiting cards!] Otherwise the tribunal cannot believe
you!”

The Patriarch cannot name them.

The Presiding Judge: “That means you have made an unsub-
stantiated assertion.”

It still remained to be proved that the Patriarch wanted to
overthrow the Soviet government. And here is how it was proved:
“Propaganda is an attempt to prepare a mood preliminary to
preparing a revolt in the future.”

The tribunal ordered criminal charges to be brought against
the Patriarch.

On May 7 sentence was pronounced: of the seventeen defen-
dants, eleven were to be shot. (They actually shot five.)

As Krylenko said: “We didn’t come here just to crack jokes.”

One week later the Patriarch was removed from office and
arrested. (But this was not the very end. For the time being he
was taken to the Donskoi Monastery and kept there in strict in-
carceration, so that the believers would grow accustomed to his
absence. Remember how just a short while before Krylenko had
been astonished: what danger could possibly threaten the Patri-
arch? Truly, when the danger really does come, there’s no help
for it, either in alarm bells or in telephone calls. )

Two weeks after that, the Metropolitan Veniamin was arrested
in Petrograd. He had not been a high official of the church before
the Revolution. Nor had he even been appointed, like almost all
Metropolitans. In the spring of 1917, for the first time since the
days of ancient Novgorod the Great, they had elected a Metro-
politan in Moscow and in Petrograd. A gentle, simple, easily
accessible man, a frequent visitor in factories and mills, popular
with the people and with the lower clergy, Veniamin had been

350 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

elected by their votes. Not understanding the times, he had seen
as his task the liberation of the church from politics “because it
had suffered much from politics in the past.” This was the Metro-
politan who was tried in:

I. The Petrograd Church Trial—June 9-July 5, 1922

The defendants, charged with resisting the requisition of church
valuables, numbered several dozen in all, including a professor
of theology and church law, archimandrites, priests, and laymen.
Semyonov, the presiding judge of the tribunal, was twenty-five
years old and, according to rumor, had formerly been a baker.
The chief accuser was a member of the collegium of the People’s
Commissariat of Justice, P. A. Krasikov—a man of Lenin’s age
and a friend of Lenin when he was in exile in the Krasnoyarsk
region and, later on, in emigration as well. Vladimir Ilyich used
to enjoy hearing him play the violin.

Out on Nevsky Prospekt, and at the Nevsky turn-off, a dense
crowd waited every day of the trial, and when the Metropolitan
was driven past, many of them knelt down and sang: “Save, O
Lord, thy people!” (It goes without saying that they arrested
overzealous believers right on the street and in the court building
also.) Most of the spectators in the court were Red Army men,
but even they rose every time the Metropolitan entered in his
white ecclesiastical hood. Yet the accuser and the tribunal called
him an enemy of the people. Let us note that this term already
existed.

From trial to trial, things closed in on the defense lawyers, and
their humiliating predicament was already very apparent. Kry-
lenko tells us nothing about this, but the gap is closed by an eye-
witness. The tribunal roared out a threat to arrest Bobrishchev-
Pushkin himself—the principal defense lawyer—and this was
already so in accord with the spirit of the times, and the threat
was so real that Bobrishchev-Pushkin made haste to hand over his
gold watch and his billfold to lawyer Gurovich. And right then
and there the tribunal actually ordered the imprisonment of a
witness, Professor Yegorov, because of his testimony on behalf
of the Metropolitan. As it turned out, Yegorov was quite pre-
pared for this. He had a thick briefcase with him in which he had
packed food, underwear, and even a small blanket.

The Law Becomesa Man | 351

The reader can observe that the court was gradually assuming
forms familiar to us.

Metropolitan Veniamin was accused of entering, with evil
intent, into an agreement with . . . the Soviet government, no
less, and thereby obtaining a relaxation of the decree on the
requisition of valuables. It was charged that his appeal to Pomgol
had been maliciously disseminated among the people. (Samizdat!
—self-publication!) And he had also acted in concert with the
world bourgeoisie.

Priest Krasnitsky, one of the principal “Living Church” schis-
matics, and GPU collaborator, testified that the priests had con-
spired to provoke a revolt against the Soviet government on the
grounds of famine.

The only witnesses heard were those of the prosecution. De-
fense witnesses were not permitted to testify. (Oh, how familiar
it all is! More and more! )

Accuser Smirnov demanded “sixteen heads.” Accuser Krasikov
cried out: “The whole Orthodox Church is a subversive organiza-
tion. Properly speaking, the entire church ought to be put in
prison.”

(This was a very realistic program. Soon it was almost realized.
And it was a good basis for a dialogue.)

Let us make use of a rather rare opportunity to cite several
sentences that have been preserved from the speech of S. Y.
Gurovich, who was the Metropolitan’s defense attorney.

“There are no proofs of guilt. There are no facts. There is not
even an indictment. . . . What will history say? [Oh, he certainly
had discovered how to frighten them! History will forget and say
nothing!] The requisition of church valuables in Petrograd took
place in a complete calm, but here the Petrograd clergy is on the
defendants’ bench, and somebody’s hands keep pushing them
toward death. The basic principle which you stress is the good
of the Soviet government. But do not forget that the church will
be nourished by the blood of martyrs. [Not in the Soviet Union,
though!] There is nothing more to be said, but it is hard to stop
talking. While the debate lasts, the defendants are alive. When
the debate comes to an end, life will end too.”

The tribunal condemned ten of them to death. They waited
more than a month for their execution, until the trial of the SR’s

352 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

had ended. (It was as though they had processed them in order
to shoot them at the same time as the SR’s.) And after that,
VTsIK, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, pardoned
six of them. And four of them—the Metropolitan Veniamin; the
Archimandrite Sergius, a former member of the State Duma;
Professor of Law Y. P. Novitsky; and the barrister Kovsharov—
were shot on the night of August 12-13.

We insistently urge our readers not to forget the principle of
provincial multiplicity. Where two church trials were held in
Moscow and Petrograd, there were twenty-two in the provinces.

They were in a big hurry to produce a Criminal Code in time for
the trial of the SR’s—the Socialist Revolutionaries. The time had
come to set in place the granite foundation stones of the Law.
On May 12, as had been agreed, the session of VTsIK convened,
but the projected Code had not yet been completed. It had only
just been delivered for analysis to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin at his
Gorki estate outside Moscow. Six articles of the Code provided
for execution by shooting as the maximum punishment. This was
unsatisfactory. On May 15, on the margins of the draft Code,
Lenin added six more articles requiring execution by shooting
(including—under Article 69—propaganda and agitation, par-
ticularly in the form of an appeal for passive resistance to the
government and mass rejection of the obligations of military
service or tax payments).’* And one other crime that called for
execution by shooting: unauthorized return from abroad (my,
how the socialists all used to bob back and forth incessantly! ).
And there was one punishment that was the equivalent of execu-
tion by shooting: exile abroad. Vladimir Ilyich foresaw a time
not far distant when there would be a constant rush of people
to the Soviet Union from Europe, and it would be impossible to
get anyone voluntarily to leave the Soviet Union for the West.
Lenin went on to express his principal conclusion to the People’s
Commissar of Justice:

14. In other words, like the Vyborg appeal, for which the Tsar’s government
had imposed sentences of three months’ imprisonment.

The Law Becomes a Man | 353

“Comrade Kursky! In my opinion we ought to extend the use
of execution by shooting (allowing the substitution of exile
abroad) to all activities of the Mensheviks, SR’s, etc. We ought
to find a formulation that would connect these activities with the
international bourgeoisie.”’» (Lenin’s italics.)

To extend the use of execution by shooting! Nothing left to the
imagination there! (And did they exile very many?) Terror is a
method of persuasion. This, too, could hardly be misunderstood.

But Kursky, nonetheless, still didn’t get the whole idea. In all
probability, what he couldn’t quite work out was a way of formu-
lating that formulation, a way of working in that very matter of
connection. The next day, he called on the Chairman of the
Council of People’s Commissars, Lenin, for clarification. We have
no way of knowing what took place during their conversation. But
following it up, on May 17, Lenin sent a second letter from
Gorki:

COMRADE KuRSKY!

As a sequel to our conversation, I am sending you an outline of a
supplementary paragraph for the Criminal Code. . . . The basic
concept, I hope, is clear, notwithstanding all the shortcomings of the
rough draft: openly to set forth a statute which is both principled and
politically truthful (and not just juridically narrow) to supply the
motivation for the essence and the justification of terror, its necessity,
its limits.

The court must not exclude terror. It would be self-deception or
deceit to promise this, and in order to provide it with a foundation
and to legalize it in a principled way, clearly and without hypocrisy
and without embellishment, it is necessary to formulate it as broadly
as possible, for only revolutionary righteousness and a revolutionary
conscience will provide the conditions for applying it more or less
broadly in practice.

With Communist greetings,
LENIN’

We will not undertake to comment on this important docu-
ment. What it calls for is silence and reflection.

The document is especially important because it was one of
Lenin’s last directives on this earth—he had not yet fallen ill—

15. Lenin, fifth edition, Vol. 45, p. 189.

16. Ibid., Vol. 39, pp. 404—405.
17. Ibid., Vol. 45, p. 190.

354 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

and an important part of his political testament. Ten days after
this letter, he suffered his first stroke, from which he recovered
only incompletely and temporarily in the autumn months of 1922.
Perhaps both letters to Kursky were written in that light and
airy white marble boudoir-study at the corner of the second floor,
where the future deathbed of the leader already stood waiting.

Attached to this letter is the rough draft mentioned in it, con-
taining two versions of the supplementary paragraph, out of which
would grow in a few years’ time both Article 58-4 and all of
our dear little old mother, Article 58. You read it and you are
carried away with admiration: that’s what it really means to
formulate it as broadly as possible! That’s what is meant by
extending its use. You read and you recollect how broad was
the embrace of that dear little old mother.

“, . propaganda or agitation, or participation in an organiza-
tion, or assistance (objectively assisting or being capable of assist-
ing) ... organizations or persons whose activity has the charac-
| aa

Hand me St. Augustine, and in a trice I can find room in that
article for him too.

Everything was inserted as required; it was retyped; execution
by shooting was extended—and the session of the All-Russian
Central Executive Committee adopted the new Criminal Code
shortly after May 20 and decreed it to be in effect from June 1,
1922, on.

And so began, on the most legal basis, the two-month-long

J. Trial of the SR’s—June 8—August 7, 1922

The court was the Supreme Tribunal, the Verkhtrib. The usual
presiding judge, Comrade Karklin (a good name for a judge—
derived from the word meaning to “croak” or “caw”), was re-
placed for this important trial, which was being watched closely
by the entire socialist world, by the resourceful Georgi Pyatakov.
(Provident fate enjoys its little jokes—but it also leaves us time
to think things over! It left Pyatakov fifteen years.) There were
no defense lawyers. The defendants, all leading SR’s, undertook
their own defense. Pyatakov bore himself harshly, and interfered
with the defendants’ having their say.

The Law Becomes a Man | 355

If my readers and I were not already sufficiently informed to
know that what was important in every trial was not the charges
brought nor guilt, so called, but expediency, we would perhaps
not be prepared to accept this trial wholeheartedly. But expedi-
ency works without fail: the SR’s, as opposed to the Mensheviks,
were considered still dangerous, not yet dispersed and broken up,
not yet finished off. And on behalf of the fortress of the newly
created dictatorship (the proletariat), it was expedient to finish
them off.

Someone unfamiliar with this principle might mistakenly view
the entire trial as an act of Party vengeance.

Involuntarily one ponders the charges set forth in this trial,
placing them in the perspective of the long-drawn-out and still
unfolding history of nations. With the exception of a very limited
number of parliamentary democracies, during a very limited
number of decades, the history of nations is entirely a history of
revolutions and seizures of power. And whoever succeeds in
making a more successful and more enduring revolution is from
that moment on graced with the bright robes of Justice, and his
every past and future step is legalized and memorialized in odes,
whereas every past and future step of his unsuccessful enemies is
criminal and subject to arraignment and a legal penalty.

The Criminal Code had been adopted only one week earlier,
but five whole years of postrevolutionary experience had been
compressed into it. Twenty, ten, and five years earlier, the SR’s
had been the party next door in the effort to overthrow Tsarism,
the party which had chiefly taken upon itself, thanks to the
particular character of its terrorist tactics, the burden of hard-
labor imprisonment, which had scarcely touched the Bolsheviks.

Now the first charge against them was that the SR’s had in-
itiated the Civil War! Yes, they began it, they had begun it. They
were accused of armed resistance to the October seizure of power.
When the Provisional Government, which they supported and
which was in part made up of their members, was lawfully swept
out of office by the machine-gun fire of the sailors, the SR’s tried
altogether illegally to defend it,’ and even returned shot for shot,

18. The fact that their efforts in defending it were very feeble, that they
were beset by hesitations, and that they renounced it right away is another
matter. For all that, their guilt was no less.

356 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

and even called into battle the military cadets of that deposed
government.

Defeated in battle, they did not repent politically. They did
not get down on their knees to the Council of People’s Com-
missars, which had declared itself to be the government. They
continued to insist stubbornly that the only legal government was
the one which had been overthrown. They refused to admit right
away that what had been their political line for twenty years was
a failure,*® and they did not ask to be pardoned, nor to have
their party dissolved and cease to be considered a party.”

The second charge against them was that they had deepened
the abyss of the Civil War by taking part in demonstrations—by
this token, rebellions—on January 5 and 6, 1918, against the
lawful authority of the workers’ and peasants’ government. They
were supporting their illegal Constituent Assembly (elected by
universal, free, equal, secret, and direct voting) against the sailors -
and the Red Guards, who legally dispersed both the Assembly
and the demonstrators. (And what good could have come of
peaceable sessions of the Constituent Assembly? Only the con-
flagration of a three-year-long Civil War. And that is why the
Civil War began, because not all the people submitted simul-
taneously and obediently to the lawful decrees of the Council of
People’s Commissars. )

The third charge was that they had not recognized the peace
treaty of Brest-Litovsk, that lawful, lifesaving peace of Brest-
Litovsk, which had cut off not Russia’s head but only parts of
its torso. By this token, declared the official indictment, there
were present “all the signs of high treason and criminal activity
directed to drawing the country into war.”

High treason! That is another club with two ends. It all de-
pends on which end you have hold of.

From this followed the serious fourth charge: in the summer
and fall of 1918, those final months and weeks when the Kaiser’s
Germany was scarcely managing to hold its own against the
Allies, and the Soviet government, faithful to the Brest treaty,

19. And it had indeed been a failure, although this did not become clear
immediately.

20. In the same way, all the local Russian governments, and those in outly-
ing areas, were illegal—those in Archangel, Samara, Ufa or Omsk, the Ukraine,
the Don, the Kuban, the Urals or Transcaucasia—inasmuch as they all de-

clared themselves to be governments after the Council of People’s Commissars
had declared itself to be the government.

The Law Becomes a Man | 357

was supporting Germany in its difficult struggle with trainloads of
foodstuffs and a monthly tribute in gold, the SR’s traitorously
prepared (well, they didn’t actually prepare anything but, as was
their custom, did more talking about it than anything—but what
if they really had!) to blow up the railroad tracks in front of one
such train, thus keeping the gold in the Motherland. In other
words, they “prepared criminal destruction of our public wealth,
the railroads.”

(At that time the Communists were not yet ashamed of and
did not conceal the fact that, yes, indeed, Russian gold had been
shipped off to Hitler’s future empire, and it didn’t seem to dawn
on Krylenko despite his study in two academic departments—
history and law—nor did any of his assistants whisper the notion
to him, that if steel rails are public wealth, then maybe gold
ingots are too?)

From this fourth charge a fifth followed inexorably: the SR’s
had intended to procure the technical equipment for such an
explosion with money received from Allied representatives. (‘They
had wanted to take money from the Entente in order not to give
gold away to Kaiser Wilhelm.) And this was the extreme of
treason! (Just in case, Krylenko did mutter something about the
SR’s also having connections with Ludendorff’s General Staff,
but this stone had indeed landed in the wrong vegetable garden,
and he quickly dropped the whole thing.)

From this it was only a very short step to the sixth charge: that
the SR’s had been Entente spies in 1918. Yesterday they had
been revolutionaries, and today they were spies. At the time, this
accusation probably sounded explosive. But since then, and after
many, many trials, the whole thing makes one want to vomit.

Well, then, the seventh and tenth points concerned collabora-
tion with Savinkov, or Filonenko, or the Cadets, or the “Union
of Rebirth” (had it really ever existed?), and even with aristocratic,
reactionary, dilettante—so-called “white-lining”—-students, or
even the White Guards.

This series of linked charges was well expounded by the prose-
cutor.”" As a result of either hard thinking in his office, or a
sudden stroke of genius on the rostrum, he managed in this trial
to come up with that tone of heartfelt sympathy and friendly
criticism which he would make use of in subsequent trials with

21. The title of “prosecutor” had by now been restored to him.

358 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

increasing self-assurance and in ever heavier doses, and which, in
1937, would result in dazzling success. This tone created a com-
mon ground—against the rest of the world—between those doing
the judging and those who were being judged, and it played on
the defendant’s particular soft spot. From the prosecutor’s ros-
trum, they said to the SR’s: “After all, you and we are revolu-
tionaries! [We! You and we—that adds up to us!] And how
could you have fallen so low as to join with the Cadets? [Yes, no
doubt your heart is breaking!] Or with the officers? Or to teach
the aristocratic, reactionary, dilettante students your brilliantly
worked-out scheme of conspiratorial operation?”

None of the defendants’ replies is available to us. Did any of
them point out that the particular characteristic of the October
coup had been to declare war immediately on all the other parties
and forbid them to join forces? (“They’re not hauling you in, so
don’t you dare peep!”) But for some reason one gets the feeling
that some of the defendants sat there with downcast eyes and
that some of them truly had divided hearts: just how could they
have fallen so low? After all, for the prisoner who’d been brought
in from a dark cell, the friendly, sympathetic attitude of the
prosecutor in the big bright hall struck home very effectively.

And Krylenko discovered another very, very logical little path
which was to prove very useful to Vyshinsky when he applied it
against Kamenev and Bukharin: On entering into an alliance with
the bourgeoisie, you accepted money from them. At first you took
it for the cause, only for the cause, and in no wise for Party pur-
poses. But where is the boundary line? Who can draw that divid-
ing line? After all, isn’t the cause a Party cause also? And so you
sank to the level—you, the Socialist Revolutionary Party—of
being supported by the bourgeoisie! Where was your revolutionary
pride?

A full quota of charges—and then some—had been piled up.
And the tribunal could have gone out to confer and thereupon
nailed each of the prisoners with his well-merited execution—but,
alas, there was a big mix-up:

a. Everything the Socialist Revolutionary Party had been ac-
cused of related to 1918.

b. Since then, on February 27, 1919, an amnesty had been
declared for SR’s exclusively, which pardoned all their past

The Law Becomesa Man | 359

belligerency against the Bolsheviks on the sole stipulation that
they would not continue the struggle into the future.
c. And they had not continued the struggle since that time.
d. And it was now 1922!

How could Krylenko get around that one?

Some thought had been given to this point. When the Socialist
International asked the Soviet government to drop charges and
not put its socialist brothers on trial, some thought had been
given to it.

In fact, at the beginning of 1919, in the face of threats from
Kolchak and Denikin, the SR’s had renounced their task of revolt
against the Bolsheviks and had abandoned all armed struggle
against them. (And to aid their Communist brethren, the Samara
SR’s had even opened up a section of the Kolchak front . . . which
was, in fact, why the amnesty had been granted.) And right at the
trial the defendant Gendelman, a member of the Central Com-
mittee, said: “Give us the chance to make use of the whole gamut
of so-called civil liberties, and we will not break the law.” (Give
it to them! The “whole gamut,” to boot! What loud-mouths! )

And it wasn’t just that they weren’t engaged in any opposition:
they had recognized the Soviet government! In other words, they
had renounced their former Provisional Government, yes, and the
Constituent Assembly as well. And all they asked was a new
election for the soviets, with freedom for all parties to engage in
electoral campaigning.

Now did you hear that? Did you hear that? That’s where the
hostile bourgeois beast poked his snout through. How could we?
After all, this is a time of crisis! After all, we are encircled by the
enemy. (And in twenty years’ time, and fifty years’ time, and a
hundred years’ time, for that matter, it will be exactly the same. )
And you want freedom for the parties to engage in electoral cam-
paigning, you bastards?

Politically sober people, said Krylenko, could only laugh in
reply and shrug their shoulders. It had been a just decision “im-
mediately and by all measures of state suppression to prevent
these groups from conducting propaganda against the govern-
ment.”*? And specifically: in reply to the renunciation by the
SR’s of armed opposition and to their peaceful proposals, they

22. Krylenko, op. cit., p. 183.

360 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

had put the entire Central Committee of the Socialist Revolu-
tionary Party in prison! (As many of them as they could catch. )

That’s how we do it!

But to keep them in prison—and hadn’t it already been three
years?—-wasn’t it necessary to try them? And what should they
be charged with? “This period had not been sufficiently investi-
gated in the pretrial examination,” our prosecutor complained.

But in the meanwhile one charge was correct. In that sange
February, 1919, the SR’s had passed a resolution which they had
not put into effect, though in terms of the new Criminal Code
that didn’t matter at all: to carry on secret agitation in the ranks
of the Red Army in order to induce the soldiers to refuse to par-
ticipate in reprisals against the peasants.

And that was a low-down, foul betrayal of the Revolution—to
try to persuade men not to take part in reprisals.

And they could also be charged with everything that the so-
called “Foreign Delegation of the Central Committee” of the SR’s
—those prominent SR’s who had fled to Europe—had said, writ-
ten, and done (mostly words).

But all that wasn’t enough. So here’s what they thought up:
“Many defendants sitting here would not deserve to be indicted in
the given case, were it not for the charge of having planned
terrorist acts.” Allegedly, when the amnesty of 1919 had been
published, “none of the leaders of Soviet Justice had imagined”
that the SR’s had also planned to use terrorism against the leaders
of the Soviet state! (Well, indeed, who could possibly have im-
agined that! The SR’s! And terrorism, all of a sudden? And if
it had come to mind, it would have been necessary to include it
in the amnesty too! Or else not accept the gap in the Kolchak
front. It was really very, very fortunate indeed that no one had
thought of it. Not until it was needed—then someone thought
of it.) So this charge had not been amnestied (for, after all,
struggle was the only offense that had been amnestied). And so
Krylenko could now make the charge!

And, in all likelihood, they had discovered so very much! So
very much!

In the first place, they had discovered what the SR leaders had
said”? back in the first days after the October seizure of power.

23. And what hadn’t those chatterboxes said in the course of a lifetime?

The Law Becomesa Man | 361

Chernov, at the Fourth Congress of the SR’s, had said that the
Party would “counterpose all its forces against any attack on the
tights of the people, as it had” under Tsarism. (And everyone
remembered how it had done that.) Gots had said. “If the auto-
crats at Smolny also infringe on the Constituent Assembly . . . the
Socialist Revolutionary Party will remember its old tried and true
tactics.”

Perhaps it did remember, but it didn’t make up its mind to
act. Yet apparently it could be tried for it anyway.

“In this area of our investigation,” Krylenko complained, be-
cause of conspiracy “there will be little testimony from witnesses.”
And he continued: “This has made my task extremely difficult. . . .
In this area [i.e., terrorism] it is necessary, at certain moments, to
wander about in the shadows.”?*

What made Krylenko’s task difficult was the fact that the use
of terrorism against the Soviet government was discussed at the
meeting of the SR Central Committee in 1918 and rejected. And
now, years later, it was necessary to prove that the SR’s had been
engaged in self-deception.

The SR’s had said at the time that they would not resort to
terrorism until and unless the Bolsheviks began to execute so-
cialists. Or, in 1920, they had said that if the Bolsheviks were to
threaten the lives of SR hostages, then the party would take up
arms.”

So the question then was: Why did they qualify their renunci-
ation of terrorism? Why wasn’t it absolute? And how had they
even dared to think about taking up arms! “Why were there no
statements equivalent to absolute renunciation?” (But, Comrade
Krylenko, maybe terrorism was their “second nature”? )

The SR Party carried out no terrorist acts whatever, and this
was clear even from Krylenko’s summing up of the charges. But
the prosecution kept stretching such facts as these: One of the
defendants had in mind a plan for blowing up the locomotive of a
train carrying the Council of People’s Commissars to Moscow.
That meant the Central Committee of the SR’s was guilty of ter-
rorism. And the terrorist Ivanova had spent one night near the
railroad station with one charge of explosives—which meant

24. Krylenko, op. cit., p. 236. (What lingo!)
25. It was evidently all right to shoot the other hostages.

362 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

there had been an attempt to blow up Trotsky’s train—and there-
fore the SR Central Committee was guilty of terrorism. And
further: Donskoi, a member of the Central Committee, warned
Fanya Kaplan that she would be expelled from the Party if she
fired at Lenin. But that wasn’t enough! Why hadn’t she been
categorically forbidden to? (Or perhaps: why hadn’t she been
denounced to the Cheka?)

It was feathers of this sort that Krylenko kept plucking from
the dead rooster—that the SR’s had not taken measures to stop
individual terrorist acts by their unemployed and languishing
gunmen. That was the whole of their terrorism. (Yes, and those
gunmen of theirs didn’t do anything either. In 1922, two of them,
Konopleva and Semyonov, with suspicious eagerness, enriched
the GPU and the tribunal with their voluntary evidence, but their
evidence couldn’t be pinned on the SR Central Committee—and
suddenly and inexplicably these inveterate terrorists were re-
leased scot-free. )

All the evidence was such that it had to be bolstered up with
props. Krylenko explained things this way in regard to one of
the witnesses: “If this person had really wanted to make things
up, it is unlikely he would have done so in such a way as to hit
the target merely by accident.” (Strongly put, indeed! This
could be said about any piece of fabricated testimony whatever.)
Or else, about Donskoi: Could one really “suspect him of possess-
ing the special insight to testify to what the prosecution wanted”?
It was just the other way around with Konopleva: the reliability
of her testimony was evidenced by the fact that she had not
testified to everything the prosecution needed. (But enough for
the defendants to be shot.) “If we ask whether Konopleva con-
cocted all this, then it is . . . clear: if one is going to concoct, one
must really concoct [He should know!], and if one is going to
expose someone, one should really expose him.”” But she, you
see, did not carry it through to the end. Then things are put still
another way: “After all, it is unlikely that Yefimov needed to put
Konopleva in danger of execution without cause.”*® Once more
correct, once more strongly put! Or, even more strongly: “Could
this encounter have taken place? Such a possibility is not ex-

26. Krylenko, op. cit., p. 251.
27. Ibid., p. 253.
28. Ibid., p. 258.

The Law Becomesa Man | 363

cluded.” Not excluded? That means it did take place. Off to the
races!

Then, too, the “subversive group.” They talked about this for a
long time, and then suddenly: “Dissolved for lack of activity.”
So what was all the fuss about? There had been several expropria-
tions of money from Soviet institutions (the SR’s had nothing
with which to work, to rent apartments, to move from city to
city). But previously these had been the lovely, noble “exes’”—
as all the revolutionists called them. And now, in a Soviet court?
They were “robbery and concealment of stolen goods.”

Through the material adduced by the prosecution in this trial,
the dull, unblinking, yellow streetlamps of the Law throw light
on the whole uncertain, wavering, deluded history of this patheti-
cally garrulous, essentially lost, helpless, and even inactive party
which never was worthily led. And its every decision or lack of
decision, its every casting about, upsurge, or retreat, was trans-
formed into and regarded as total guilt . . . guilt and more guilt.

And if in September, 1921, ten months before the trial, the SR
Central Committee, already sitting in the Butyrki, had written
to the newly elected Central Committee that it did not agree to the
overthrow of the Bolshevik dictatorship by any available means,
but only through rallying the working masses and the dissemina-
tion of propaganda—all of which meant that, even as they
languished in prison, they did not agree to being liberated through
either terrorism or conspiracy—then that, too, was converted into
their primary guilt: Aha! so that means that you did agree to its
overthrow.

And what if they were, nevertheless, not guilty of overthrowing
the government, and not guilty of terrorism, and if there had
been hardly any “expropriations” at all, and if they had long
since been forgiven for all the rest? Our favorite prosecutor
pulled out his canonical weapon of last resort: “Ultimately, failure
to denounce is a category of crime applying to all the defendants
without exception, and it must be considered as having been
proved.””°

The Socialist Revolutionary Party was guilty of not having
squealed on itself! Now there’s something that couldn’t miss! This
represented a discovery that juridical thought had made in the
new Code. It was a paved highway along which they would keep

29. Ibid., p. 305.

364 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

driving and driving grateful descendants into Siberia!

And Krylenko burst out in a temper: “Hardened eternal ene-
mies”—that’s who the defendants are! In that case it’s quite clear
even without any trial what has to be done with them.

The Code was still so new that Krylenko could not even re-
member the main counterrevolutionary articles by their numbers
—but how he slashed about with those numbers! How pro-
foundly he cited and interpreted them! Just as if the blade of the
guillotine had for decades hinged and dropped only on those
articles. And especially new and important was the fact that we
did not draw the distinction between methods and means the old
Tsarist Code had drawn. Such distinctions had no influence either
on the classification of the charges or on the penalties imposed!
For us, intent and action were identical! A resolution had been
passed—we would try them for that. And whether it “was carried
out or not had no essential significance.”®° Whether a man
whispered to his wife in bed that it would be a good thing to
overthrow the Soviet government or whether he engaged in
propaganda during elections or threw a bomb, it was all one and
the same! And the punishment was identical!!!

And just as a foresighted painter proceeds from his first few
brusquely drawn, angular strokes to create the whole desired
portrait, so, for us, the entire panorama of 1937, 1945, and 1949
becomes ever clearer and more visible in the sketches of 1922.

But no, one thing is missing! What’s missing is the conduct of
the defendants. They have not yet become trained sheep. They
are still people! We have been told little, very little, but from that
little we can understand a great deal. Sometimes through care-
lessness, Krylenko cites what they said right at the trial. For
example, the defendant Berg “accused the Bolsheviks of responsi-
bility for the deaths of January 5’”—shooting down those who
were demonstrating on behalf of the Constituent Assembly. And
what Liberov said was even more direct: “I admit I was guilty
of failing to work hard enough at overthrowing the Bolshevik
government in 1918.*t Yevgeniya Ratner adhered to the same
line, and Berg also declared: “I consider myself guilty before the
workers’ Russia for having been unable to fight with all my
strength against the so-called workers’ and peasants’ government,

30. Ibid., p. 185.
31. Ibid., p. 103.

The Law Becomesa Man | 365

but I hope that my time has not yet gone.”** (It has gone, darling,
all gone!)

Of course, there is in all this an element of the ancient passion
for the resounding phrase, but there is firmness too.

The prosecutor argued: the accused are dangerous to Soviet
Russia because they consider everything they did to have been a
good thing. “Perhaps certain of the defendants find their own
consolation in the hope that some future chronicler will praise
them or their conduct at the trial.”**

And a decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee
issued after the trial declared: “At the trial itself they reserved
to themselves the right to continue” their former activity.

The defendant Gendelman-Grabovsky (a lawyer himself) was
conspicuous during the trial for his arguments with Krylenko on
tampering with the testimony of witnesses and on “special methods
of treating witnesses before the trial”—in other words, the
obvious working-over they had gotten from the GPU. (It is all
there! All the elements are there! There was only a little way to
go before attaining the ideal.) Apparently the preliminary in-
terrogation had been conducted under the supervision of the
prosecutor—that same Krylenko. And during that process in-
dividual instances of a lack of consistency in testimony had been
ironed out. Yet some testimony was presented for the first time
only at the trial itself.

Well, so what! So there were some rough spots. So it wasn’t
perfect. But in the last analysis, “We have to declare altogether
clearly and coldly that .. . we are not concerned with the question
of how the court of history is going to view our present deed.’**

And as far as the rough spots are concerned, we will take them
under advisement and correct them.

But as it was, Krylenko, squirming, had to bring up—prob-
ably for the first and last time in Soviet jurisprudence—the matter
of the inquiry, the initial inquiry required before investigation.
And here’s how cleverly he handled this point: The proceeding
which took place in the absence of the prosecutor and which you
considered the investigation was actually the inquiry. And the
proceeding in the presence of the prosecutor which you regarded

32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., p. 325.
34, Ibid.

366 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

as the reinvestigation, when all the loose ends were gathered up
and all the bolts tightened, was really the investigation. The dis-
organized “materials provided by the Organs for inquiry and
unverified by the investigation have much less value as proof
than the materials provided by the skillfully directed investiga-
tion.”

Clever, wasn’t it? Just try grinding that up in your mortar!

To be practical about it, Krylenko no doubt resented having
to spend half a year getting ready for this trial, then another two
months barking at the defendants, and then having to drag out
his summation for fifteen hours, when all these defendants “had
more than once been in the hands of the extraordinary Organs at
times when these Organs had extraordinary powers; but, thanks to
some circumstances or other, they had succeeded in surviving.”*®
So now Krylenko had to slave away to try and get them executed
legally.

There was, of course, “only one possible verdict—execution
for every last one of them”!*’ But Krylenko qualifies this gen-
erously. Because this case is being watched by the whole world,
the prosecutor’s demand “does not constitute a directive to the
court” which the latter would “be obliged to accept immediately
for consideration or decision.’’**

What a fine court, too, that requires such an explanation!

And, indeed, the tribunal did demonstrate its daring in the
sentences it imposed: it did not hand down the death penalty
for “every last one of them,” but for fourteen only. Most of the
rest got prison and camp sentences, while sentences in the form
of productive labor were imposed on another hundred.

And just remember, reader, remember: “All the other courts
of the Republic watch what the Supreme Tribunal does. It pro-
vides them with guidelines.”*°

The sentences of the Verkhtrib are used “as directives for their
guidance.”*° As to how many more would now be railroaded in
the provinces, you can figure that out for yourself.

And, probably, on appeal the decision of the Presidium of the
All-Russian Central Executive Committee was worth the whole

35. Ibid., p. 238. 38. Ibid., p. 319.
36. Ibid., p. 322. 39. Ibid., p. 407.
37. Ibid., p. 326. 40. Ibid., p. 409.

The Law Becomes a Man | 367

trial: the death sentences were to remain in effect, but not to be
carried out for the time being. The further fate of those con-
demned would depend, then, on the conduct of those SR’s who
had not yet been arrested, apparently including those abroad as
well. In other words: If you move against us, we'll squash them.

In the fields of Russia they were reaping the second peacetime
harvest. There was no shooting except in the courtyards of the
Cheka. (Perkhurov in Yaroslavl, Metropolitan Veniamin in
Petrograd. And always, always, always.) Beneath the azure sky
our first diplomats and journalists sailed abroad across the blue
waters. And the Central Executive Committee of Workers’ and
Peasants’ Deputies thrust into its pockets eternal hostages.

The members of the ruling Party read all sixty issues of Pravda
devoted to the trial—for they all read the papers—and all of
them said: “Yes, yes, yes.” No one mumbled: “No!”

What, then, were they surprised at in 1937? What was there to
complain about? Hadn’t all the foundations of lawlessness been
laid—first by the extrajudicial reprisals of the Cheka, and then
by these early trials and this young Code? Wasn’t 1937 also
expedient (expedient for Stalin’s purposes and, perhaps, History’s,
too, for that matter)?

Prophetically, Krylenko let it slip that they were judging not
the past but the future.

Only the first swath cut by the scythe is difficult.

On or about August 20, 1924, Boris Viktorovich Savinkov
crossed the Soviet border. He was immediately arrested and taken
to the Lubyanka.** In all, the interrogation lasted for just one

41. Many hypotheses were advanced about his return. Only a little while
ago, a certain Ardamatsky, a person obviously connected with the archives
and personnel of the Committee for State Security, published a story which,
despite being adorned with pretentiously inflated literary gewgaws, is evidently
close to the truth. (The magazine Neva, No. 11, 1967.) Having induced certain
of Savinkov’s agents to betray him and having ‘deceived others, the GPU used
them to set a foolproof trap, convincing Savinkov that inside Russia a large
underground organization was languishing for lack of a worthy leader! It
would have been impossible to devise a more effective trap! And it would have
been impossible for Savinkov, after such a confused and sensational life, merely
to spin it out quietly to the end in Nice. He couldn’t bear not trying to pull off
one more feat and not returning to Russia and his death.

368 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

session, which consisted solely of voluntary testimony and an
evaluation of his activity. The official indictment was ready by
August 23. The speed was totally unbelievable, but it had im-
pact. (Someone had estimated the situation quite accurately: to
have forced false and pitiful testimony out of Savinkov by torture
would only have wrecked the authenticity of the picture.)

In the official indictment, couched in already-well-developed
terminology that turned everything upside down, Savinkov was
charged with just about everything imaginable: with being a
“consistent enemy of the poorest peasantry”; with “assisting the
Russian bourgeoisie in carrying out its imperialist ambitions”
(in other words, he was in favor of continuing the war with
Germany); with “maintaining relations with representatives of
the Allied command” (this would have been when he was in
charge of the Ministry of War!); with “becoming a member of
soldiers’ committees for purposes of provocation” (i.e., he was
elected by the soldiers’ committees); and, last but not least, some-
thing to make even the chickens cackle with laughter—with
having had “monarchist sympathies.”

But all that was old hat. There were some new items too—
the standard charges for all future trials: money from the im-
perialists; espionage for Poland (they left out Japan, believe it
or not); yes, and he had also wanted to poison the Red Army with
potassium cyanide (but for some reason he did not poison even
one Red Army soldier).

On August 26 the trial began. The presiding judge was Ulrikh
—this being our earliest encounter with him. And there was no
prosecutor at all, nor any defense lawyer.

Savinkov was lackadaisical in defending himself, and he raised
hardly any objection at all to the evidence. He conceived of this
trial in a lyrical sense. It was his last encounter with Russia and
his last opportunity to explain himself in public. And to repent.
(Not of these imputed sins, but of others.)

(And that theme song fitted well here, and greatly confused the
defendant: “After all, we are all Russians together. You and we
adds up to us. You love Russia beyond a doubt, and we respect
your love—and do we not love Russia too? In fact, are we not
at present the fortress and the glory of Russia? And you wanted
to fight against us? Repent!”)

The Law Becomes a Man | 369

But it was the sentence that was most wonderful: “Imposition
of the death penalty is not required in the interests of preserving
revolutionary law and order, and, on the grounds that motives of
vengeance should not influence the sense of justice of the prole-
tarian masses”—the death penalty was commuted to ten years’
imprisonment.

Now that was a sensation! And it confused many minds too.
Did it mean a relaxation? A transformation? Ulrikh even pub-
lished in Pravda an apologetic explanation of why Savinkov had
not been executed.

You see how strong the Soviet government has become in
only seven years! Why should it be afraid of some Savinkov or
other! (On the twentieth anniversary of the Revolution, it is
going to get weaker, and don’t be too hard on us because we are
going to execute thousands. )

And so, on the heels of the first riddle of his return, there
would have been the second riddle of his being spared capital
punishment had it not been overshadowed in May, 1925, by a
third riddle: in a state of depression, Savinkov jumped from an
unbarred window into the interior courtyard of the Lubyanka,
and the gaypayooshniki, his guardian angels, simply couldn’t
manage to stop him and hold on to his big, heavy body. However,
just in case—so that there wouldn’t be any scandal in the service
—Savinkov left them a suicide letter in which he explained
logically and coherently why he was killing himself—and this
letter was so authentically phrased, so clearly written in Savin-
kov’s style and vocabulary, that even Lev Borisovich, the son of
the deceased, was fully convinced of its genuineness and explained
to everyone in Paris that no one except his father could have
written it and that he had ended his life because he realized his
political bankruptcy.*

And all the major and most famous trials are still ahead of us.

42. And we, silly prisoners of a later Lubyanka, confidently parroted to
one another that the steel nets hanging in the Lubyanka stairwells had been
installed after Savinkov had committed suicide there. Thus do we succumb to
fancy legends to the extent of forgetting that the experience of jailers is, after
all, international in character. Such nets existed in American prisons as long ago
as the beginning of the century—and how could Soviet technology have been
allowed to lag behind?

In 1937, when he was dying in a camp in the Kolyma, the former Chekist

Artur Pryubel told one of his fellow prisoners that he had been one of the
four who threw Savinkov from a fifth-floor window into the Lubyanka court-

370 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

yard! (And there is no conflict between that statement and Ardamatsky’s recent
account: There was a low sill; it was more like a door to the balcony than a
window—they had picked the right room! Only, according to Ardamatsky, the
guards were careless; according to Pryubel, they rushed him all together.)

Thus the second riddle, the unusually lenient sentence, was unraveled by
the crude third “riddle.”

The story ascribed to Pryubel could not be checked, but I had heard it, and
in 1967 I told it to M. P. Yakubovich. He, with his still youthful enthusiasm
and shining eyes, exclaimed: “I believe it. Things fit! And I didn’t believe
Blyumkin; I thought he was just bragging.” What he had learned was this:
At the end of the twenties, Blyumkin had told Yakubovich, after swearing him
to secrecy, that he was the one who had written Savinkov’s so-called suicide
note, on orders from the GPU. Apparently Blyumkin was allowed to see
Savinkov in his cell constantly while he was in prison. He kept him amused in the
evenings. (Did Savinkov sense that death was creeping up on him ... sly,
friendly death, which gives you no chance to guess the form your end will
take?) And this had helped Blyumkin acquire Savinkov’s manner of speech
and thought, had enabled him to enter into the framework of his last ideas.

And they ask: Why throw him out the window? Wouldn’t it have been
easier simply to poison him? Perhaps they showed someone the remains or
thought they might need to.

And where, if not here, is the right place to report the fate of Blyumkin,
who for all his Chekist omnipotence was fearlessly brought up short by Man-
delstam. Ehrenburg began to tell Blyumkin’s story, and suddenly became
ashamed and dropped the subject. And there is a story to tell, too. After the
1918 rout of the Left SR’s, Blyumkin, the assassin of the German Ambassador
Mirbach, not only went unpunished, was not only spared the fate of all the
other Left SR’s, but was protected by Dzerzhinsky, just as Dzerzhinsky had
wanted to protect Kosyrev. Superficially he converted to Bolshevism, and was
kept on, one gathers, for particularly important assassinations. At one point,
close to the thirties, he was secretly sent to Paris to kill Bazhenov, a member
of the staff of Stalin’s secretariat who had defected, and one night he succeeded
in throwing him off a train. However, his gambler’s blood, or perhaps his
admiration of Trotsky, led Blyumkin to the Princes’ Islands in Turkey, where
Trotsky was living. He asked Trotsky whether there were any assignments he
could carry out for him in the Soviet Union, and Trotsky gave him a package
for Radek. Blyumkin delivered it, and his visit to Trotsky would have remained
a secret had not the brilliant Radek already been a stool pigeon. Radek brought
down Blyumkin, who was thereupon devoured by the maw of the monster his
own hands had suckled with its first bloody milk.

Chapter 10

The Law Matures

But where were those mobs insanely storming the barbed-wire
barricades on our western borders whom we were going to shoot,
under Article 71 of the Criminal Code, for unauthorized return
to the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic? Contrary
to scientific prediction, there were no such crowds, and that
article of the Code dictated by Lenin to Kursky remained use-
less. The only Russian crazy enough to do it was Savinkov, and
they had ducked applying that article even to him. On the other
hand, the opposite penalty—exile abroad instead of execution
—was tried out immediately on a large scale.

In those days when he was composing the Criminal Code,
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, developing his brilliant idea, wrote in the
heat of the moment, on May 19:

Comrade Dzerzhinsky! On the question of exiling abroad writers
and professors who aid the counterrevolution: this is a measure which
must be prepared most carefully. Unless we prepare well, we can
commit stupidities. .. . We must arrange the business in such a way
as to catch these “military spies” and keep on catching them con-
stantly and systematically and exiling them abroad. I beg you to show
this secretly, and without making any copies of it, to members of the
Politburo.?

The extreme secrecy was natural in view of the importance

1. Lenin, fifth edition, Vol. 54, pp. 265-266.
371

372 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

and instructive impact of the measure. The crystal-clear line-up
of forces on the class front in Soviet Russia was, to put it simply,
spoiled by the presence of this shapeless, jellylike stain of the old
bourgeois intelligentsia, which in the ideological area genuinely
played the role of military spies—and the very best solution one
could imagine was to scrape off that stagnant scum of ideas and
toss it out abroad.

Comrade Lenin had already been stricken by his illness, but
the members of the Politburo had apparently given their approval,
and Comrade Dzerzhinsky had done the catching. At the end of
1922, about three hundred prominent Russian humanists were
loaded onto—a barge, perhaps? No, they were put on a steamer
and sent off to the European garbage dump. (Among those who
settled down in exile and acquired reputations were the philos-
ophers N. O. Lossky, S. N. Bulgakov, N. A. Berdyayev, F. A.
Stepun, B. P. Vysheslavtsev, L. P. Karsavin, S. L. Frank, I. A.
Ilin; the historians S. P. Melgunov, V. A. Myakotin, A. A.
Kizevetter, I. I. Lapshin, and others; the writers and publicists
Y. I. Aikhenvald, A. S. Izgoyev, M. A. Osorgin, A. V. Peshe-
khonov. At the beginning of 1923, additional small groups were
sent off, including for example V. F. Bulgakov, the secretary of
Lev Tolstoi. And because of questionable associations some
mathematicians also shared this fate, including D. F. Selivanov.)

However, it didn’t work out constantly and systematically. Per-
haps the roar with which the émigrés announced that they re-
garded it as a “gift” made it apparent that this punishment left
something to be desired, that it was a mistake to have let go
good material for the executioner, and that poisonous flowers
might grow on that garbage dump. And so they abandoned this
form of punishment. And all subsequent purging led to either the
executioner or the Archipelago.

The improved Criminal Code promulgated in 1926, which,
in effect, continued right into Khrushchev’s times, tied all the
formerly scattered political articles into one durable dragnet—
Article 58—and the roundup was under way. The catch swiftly
expanded to include the engineering and technical intelligentsia;
it was especially dangerous because it occupied a firm position
in the economy and it was hard to keep an eye on it with the
help of the Progressive Doctrine alone. It now became clear that

The Law Matures | 373

the trial in defense of Oldenborger had been a mistake—after all,
a very nice little center had been organized there. And Krylenko’s
declaration that “there was no question of sabotage on the part
of the engineers in 1920 and 1921”? had granted an all too hasty
absolution. Now it was not sabotage but worse—wrecking, a
word discovered, it appears, by a rank-and-file interrogator in
the Shakhty case.

It had no sooner been established that wrecking was what had
to be tracked down—notwithstanding the nonexistence of this
concept in the entire history of mankind—than they began to
discover it without any trouble in all branches of industry and
in all individual enterprises. However, there was no unity of plan,
no perfection of execution, in all these hit-or-miss : discoveries,
although Stalin, by virtue of his character, and of course the
entire investigative branch of our judicial apparatus, evidently
aspired to just that. But our Law had finally matured and could
show the world something really perfect—a big, coordinated,
well-organized trial, this time a trial of engineers. And that is
how the Shakhty case came about.

K. The Shakhty Case—May 18-July 15, 1928

This case was tried before a Special Assize of the Supreme
Court of the U.S.S.R., under Presiding Judge A. Y. Vyshinsky
(who was still the Rector of First Moscow University); the chief
accuser was N. V. Krylenko (what a significant encounter!—
rather like a handing over of the juridical relay-baton).* There
were fifty-three defendants and fifty-six witnesses. How spec-
tacular!

Alas, in its spectacular aspect lay the weakness of this case.
If one were to tie to each of the defendants only three threads of
evidence, there would still have to be 159 of them. And mean-
while Krylenko had only ten fingers and Vyshinsky another ten.
Of course, the “defendants strove to expose their heinous crimes

2. Krylenko, Za Pyat Let, p. 437.

3. And the members of the tribunal were the old revolutionaries Vasilyev-
Yuzhin and Antonov-Saratovsky. The very simple folk sound of their family
names inclines one to a favorable reaction. They are easy to remember. And
when suddenly, in 1962, obituaries of certain victims of repression appeared in

Izvestiya, whose signature was at the bottom? That of the long-lived Antonov-
Saratovsky!

374 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

to society”—but not all of them did, only sixteen; thirteen
wiggled back and forth, and twenty-four didn’t admit their guilt
at all.* This introduced an impermissible discord, and the masses
could certainly not understand it. Along with its positive aspects
—which had, incidentally, already been displayed in earlier trials
—such as the helplessness of the defendants and of the defense
attorneys, and their inability either to budge or to deflect the
implacable boulder of the sentence—the shortcomings of the
new trial were fully apparent. Someone less experienced than
Krylenko might have been forgiven them—but not he.

On the threshold of the classless society, we were at last capable
of realizing the conflictless trial—a reflection of the absence
of inner conflict in our social structure—in which not only the
judge and the prosecutor but also the defense lawyers and the
defendants themselves would strive collectively to achieve their
common purpose.

Anyway, the whole scale of the Shakhty case, comprising as
it did the coal industry alone and the Donets Basin alone, was
disproportionately paltry for this era.

It appears that then and there, on the day the Shakhty case
ended, Krylenko began to dig a new, capacious pit. (Even two
of his own colleagues in the Shakhty case—the public accusers
Osadchy and Shein—fell into it.) And it goes without saying
that the entire apparatus of the OGPU, which had already landed
in Yagoda’s firm hands, aided him willingly and adroitly. It was
necessary to create and uncover an engineers’ organization which
encompassed the entire country. And for this purpose it was
essential to have several strong, prominent “wreckers” at its head.
And what engineer was unaware of just such an unequivocally
strong and impatiently proud leader—Pyotr Akimovich Pal-
chinsky? An important mining engineer from as far back as the
beginning of the century, he had been the Deputy Chairman of
the War Industry Committee during World War I—in other
words, he had directed the war efforts of all Russian industry,
which had managed, during the course of the war, to make up for
the failures in Tsarist preparations. After February, 1917, he
became the Deputy Minister of Trade and Industry. He had been
persecuted under the Tsar for revolutionary activity. He had been
imprisoned three times after October—in 1917, 1918, and 1922.

4. Pravda, May 24, 1928, p. 3.

The Law Matures | 375

From 1920 on, he had been a professor at the Mining Institute
and a consultant to the Gosplan—the State Planning Commis-
sion. (For more details about him see Part III, Chapter 10.)

They picked this Palchinsky to be the chief defendant in a
grandiose new trial. However, the thoughtless Krylenko, stepping
into what was for him a new field—engineering—not only knew
nothing about the resistance of materials but could not even
conceive of the potential resistance of souls . . . despite ten
years of already sensational activity as a prosecutor. Krylenko’s
choice turned out to be a mistake. Palchinsky resisted every
pressure the OGPU knew—and did not surrender; in fact, he
died without signing any sort of nonsense at all. N. K. von Meck
and A. F. Velichko were subjected to torture with him, and they,
too, appear not to have given in. We do not yet know whether
they died while under torture or whether they were shot. But
they proved it was possible to resist and that it was possible not
to give in—and thus they left behind a spotlight of reproach to
shine on all the famous subsequent defendants.

To cover up his defeat, on May 24, 1929, Yagoda published
a brief GPU communiqué on the execution of the three for large-
scale wrecking, which also announced the condemnation of many
other unidentified persons.°

But how much time had been spent for nothing! Nearly a whole
year! And how many nights of interrogation! And how much
inventiveness on the part of the interrogators! And all to no
avail. And Krylenko had to start over from the very beginning
and find a leader who was both brilliant and strong, and at the
same time utterly weak and totally pliable. But so little did he
understand this cursed breed of engineers that another whole
year was spent in unsuccessful tries. From the summer of 1929
on, he worked over Khrennikov, but Khrennikov, too, died
without agreeing to play a dastardly role. They twisted old
Fedotov, but he was too old, and furthermore he was a textile
engineer, which was an unprofitable field. And one more year
was wasted! The country was waiting for the all-inclusive
wreckers’ trial, and Comrade Stalin was waiting—but things
just couldn’t seem to fall into place for Krylenko.® It was only

5. Izvestiya, May 24, 1929.

6. And it is quite possible that this failure of his was held against him by
the Leader and led to the symbolic destruction of the prosecutor—on the very
same guillotine as his victims.

376 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

in the summer of 1930 that someone found or suggested Ramzin,
the Director of the Thermal Engineering Institute! He was
arrested, and in three months a magnificent drama was prepared
and performed, the genuine perfection of our justice and an un-
attainable model for world justice.

L. The Promparty (Industrial Party) Trial—
November 25—December 7, 1930

This case was tried at a Special Assize of the Supreme Court,
with the same Vyshinsky, the same Antonov-Saratovsky, and
that same favorite of ours, Krylenko.

This time none of those “technical reasons” arose to prevent
the reader’s being offered a full stenographic report of the trial’
or to prohibit the attendance of foreign correspondents.

There was a majesty of concept: all the nation’s industry, all
its branches and planning organs, sat on the defendants’ benches.
(However, only the eyes of the man who arranged it all could
see the crevices into which the mining industry and railroad
transportation had disappeared.) At the same time there was a
thrift in the use of material: there were only eight defendants in
all. (The mistakes of the Shakhty trial had been taken into
account. )

You are going to exclaim: Can eight men represent the en-
tire industry of the country? Yes, indeed; we have more even
than we need. Three out of eight are solely in textiles, represent-
ing the industrial branch most important for national defense. But
there were, no doubt, crowds of witnesses? Just seven in all, who
were exactly the same sort of wreckers as the defendants and were
also prisoners. But there were no doubt bales of documents that
exposed them? Drawings? Projects? Directives? Summaries of
results? Proposals? Dispatches? Private correspondence? No,
not one! You mean to say, Not even one tiny piece of paper?
How could the GPU let that sort of thing get by? They had
arrested all those people, and they hadn’t even grabbed one little
piece of paper? “There had been a lot,” but “it had all been
destroyed.” Because “there was no place to keep the files.” At the

7. Protsess Prompartii (The Trial of the Promparty), Moscow, Sovetskoye
Zakonodatelstvo (Soviet Legislation Publishing House), 1931.

The Law Matures | 377

trial they produced only a few newspaper articles, published in
the émigré press and our own. But in that event how could the
prosecution present its case? Well, to be sure, there was Nikolai
Vasilyevich Krylenko. And, to be sure, it wasn’t the first time
either. “The best evidence, no matter what the circumstances, is
the confessions of the defendants.”®

But what confessions! These confessions were not forced but
inspired—trepentance tearing whole monologues from the breast,
and talk, talk, and more talk, and self-exposure and self-flagella-
tion! They told old man Fedotov, who was sixty-six, that he could
sit down, that he had talked long enough, but no, he kept pouring
out additional explanations and interpretations. For five sessions
in a row, no questions were asked. The defendants kept talking
and talking and explaining and kept asking for the floor again
in order to supply whatever they had left out. They presented
inferentially everything the prosecution needed without any ques-
tions whatever being asked. Ramzin, after extensive explanations,
went on to provide brief résumés, for the sake of clarity, as if he
were addressing slow-witted students. The defendants were afraid
most of all that something might be left unexplained, that some-
one might go unexposed, that someone’s name might go un-
mentioned, that someone’s intention to wreck might not have
been made clear. And how they reviled themselves! “I am a class
enemy!” “I was bribed.” “Our bourgeois ideology.” And then
the prosecutor: “Was that your error?” And Charnovsky replied:
“And crime!” There was simply nothing for Krylenko to do.
For five sessions he went on drinking tea and eating cookies or
whatever else they brought him.

But how did the defendants sustain such an emotional ex-
plosion? There was no tape recorder to take down their words,
but Otsep, the defense attorney, described them: “The defend-
ants’ words flowed in a businesslike manner, cold and profession-
ally calm.” There you are! Such a passion for confession—and
businesslike at the same time? Cold? More than that: they appear
to have mumbled their glib repentance so listlessly that Vyshinsky
often asked them to speak louder, more clearly, because they
couldn’t be heard.

The harmony of the trial was not at all disturbed by the de-

8. Ibid., p. 452.

378 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

fense, which agreed with all the prosecutor’s proposals. The
principal defense lawyer called the prosecutor’s summation his-
toric and described his own as narrow, admitting that in making
it he had gone against the dictates of his heart, for “a Soviet de-
fense lawyer is first of all a Soviet citizen” and “like all workers,
he, too, is outraged” at the crimes of the defendants.° During
the trial the defense asked shy and tentative questions and then
instantly backed away from them if Vyshinsky interrupted. The
lawyers actually defended only two harmless textile officials and
did not challenge the formal charges nor the description of the
defendants’ actions, but asked only whether the defendants might
avoid execution. Is it more useful, Comrade Judges, “to have
their corpses or their labor?”

. How foul-smelling were the crimes of these bourgeois engi-
neers? Here is what they consisted of. They planned to reduce the
tempo of development, as, for instance, to an over-all annual increase
in production of only 20 to 22 percent, whereas the workers were
prepared to increase it by 40 to 50 percent. They slowed down the
rate of mining local fuels. They were too slow in developing the
Kuznetsk Basin. They exploited theoretical and economic arguments
—such as whether to supply the Donets Basin with electricity from
the Dnieper power station or whether to build a supertrunk-line
between Moscow and the Donbas—in order to delay the solutions of
important problems. (The work stops while engineers argue!) They
postponed considering new engineering projects (i.e., they did not
authorize them immediately). In lectures on the resistance of mate-
rials, they took an anti-Soviet line. They installed worn-out equipment.
They tied up capital funds, for example, by using them for costly
and lengthy construction projects. They carried out unnecessary (!)
repairs. They misused metals (some grades of iron were wanting).
They created an imbalance between the departments of a plant and
between the supply of raw materials and the capacity for processing
them industrially. (This was particularly notable in the textile industry,
where they built one or two factories more than they needed to process
the cotton harvest.) Then they leaped from minimal to maximal
plans. And obvious wrecking began through the accelerated develop-
ment of that same unfortunate textile industry. Most importantly,
they planned sabotage in the field of electric power—even though
none was ever carried out. Thus wrecking did not take the form of

9. Ibid., p. 488.

The Law Matures | 379

actual damage done but remained within the area of operational
planning, yet it was intended to lead to a nationwide crisis and even
to economic paralysis in 1930! But it didn’t—and only because of the
competitive industrial and financial plans of the masses (doubling
the figures!)....

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” begins the skeptical reader.

What? That isn’t enough for you? But if, at the trial, we repeat
every point and chew it over five or eight times, then perhaps
it turns out not to be so negligible?

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” The reader of the sixties nonetheless
sticks to his own view. “Mightn’t all that have happened precisely
because of those competing industrial and financial plans? Aren’t
things bound to be out of balance if any union meeting, without
consulting Gosplan, can twist the ratios around as it pleases?”

Oh, the prosecutor’s bread is bitter! After all, they decided
to publish every last word! That meant that engineers would
read it too. “You’ve made your bed, now lie in it.” And Krylenko
rushed in fearlessly to discuss and to question and cross-question
engineering details! And the inside pages and inserts of the
enormous newspapers were full of small print about fine tech-
nical points. The notion was that every reader would be over-
come by the sheer mass of material, that he wouldn’t have enough
time, even if he used up all his evenings and his rest days too,
and so he wouldn’t read it all but would only notice the refrain
following every few paragraphs: “We were wreckers, wreckers,
wreckers.”

But suppose someone did begin, and read every last line?

In that case, he would come to see, through the banality of self-
accusations, composed with such ineptitude and stupidity, that
the Lubyanka boa constrictor had gotten involved in something
outside its competence, its own kind of work, that what breaks
free of the crude noose is the strong-winged thought of the
twentieth century. There the prisoners are: in the dock, submis-
sive, repressed—but their thought leaps out. Even their terrified,
tired tongues manage to name everything with its proper name
and to tell us everything.

. .. Here is the situation in which they worked. Kalinnikov: “Well,
to be sure, a situation of technical distrust was created.” Larichev:
“Whether we wanted to or not, we still had to produce that 42 millions

380 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

of tons of petroleum [i.e., it had been thus ordered from on high]...
because, no matter what, 42 million tons of petroleum could not have
been produced under any circumstances whatever.”*°

All the work of that unhappy generation of our engineers was
squeezed between two such impossibilities. The Thermal Engineering
Institute was proud of its principal research achievement, which was
the sharply improved coefficient of fuel consumption. On this basis,
lower requirements for fuel production had been stipulated in the
preliminary plan. And that meant wrecking—reducing fuel resources.
In the transportation plan, they had provided for all freight cars to
be equipped with automatic coupling. And that meant wrecking:
they had tied up capital funds. After all, it takes a long time to intro-
duce automatic coupling, and the capital investment involved in
installing it can only be recouped over a long period, and we want
everything immediately! In order to make more efficient use of single-
track railroads, they decided to increase the size of the locomotives and
freight cars. And was that considered modernization? No, it was wreck-
ing. Because in that case it would have been necessary to invest funds in
strengthening the roadbeds and the superstructures of the bridges.
From the profound economic consideration that in America capital
is cheap and labor dear, and that the situation here is just the opposite,
and that we therefore ought not to borrow things with monkeylike
imitativeness, Fedotov concluded that it was useless for us to purchase
expensive American assembly-line machinery. For the next ten years
it would be more profitable for us to buy less sophisticated English
machinery and to put more workers on it, since it was inevitable that
in ten years’ time whatever we had purchased would be replaced
anyway, no matter what. And we could then buy more expensive
machinery. So that, too, was wrecking. Alleging economy as his
reason, what he really wanted, they charged, was to avoid having the
most advanced type of machinery in Soviet industry. They began to
build new factories out of reinforced concrete, instead of cheaper
ordinary concrete, on the grounds that over a hundred-year period
reinforced concrete would recoup the additional investment many
times over. So that, too, was wrecking: tying up capital; using up
scarce reinforcing rods when iron was in short supply. (What was it
supposed to be kept for—false teeth?)

From among the defendants, Fedotov willingly conceded: Of
course, if every kopeck must be counted today, then it could be
considered wrecking. The English say: Im not rich enough to
buy cheap goods.

10. Ibid., p. 325.

The Law Matures | 381

He tries softly to explain to the hardheaded prosecutor: “Theoreti-
cal approaches of every kind project norms which in the final analysis
are [they will be considered to be] wrecking. .. .”"*

Well, tell me now: how much more clearly could a frightened de-
fendant speak out? What is theory to us is wrecking to you! Because
you are compelled to grab today, without any thought for tomorrow.

Old Fedotov tries to explain where thousands and millions of rubles
are lost in the insane rush of the Five-Year Plan: Cotton is not sorted
where it is grown so that every factory can be sent that grade and kind
of cotton it requires; instead, it is shipped any old way, all mixed up.
But the prosecutor doesn’t listen to him. With the stubbornness of a
block of stone he keeps coming back again and again—ten times—
to the more obvious question he has put together out of children’s
building blocks: Why did they begin to build the so-called “factory-
palaces,” with high ceilings, broad corridors, and unnecessarily good
ventilation? Was that not the most obvious sort of wrecking? After
all, that amounted to tying up capital irrevocably! The bourgeois
wreckers explain to him that the People’s Commissariat of Labor
wanted to build factories for the workers in the land of the proletariat
which were spacious and had good air. [That means there are also
wreckers in the People’s Commissariat of Labor. Make a note of
that!] The doctors had insisted on thirty feet of space between floors,
and Fedotov reduced it to twenty—so why not to sixteen? Now that
was wrecking! (If he had reduced it to fifteen, that would have been
flagrant wrecking: he would have wanted to create the nightmare
conditions of a capitalist factory for free Soviet workers.) They ex-
plain to Krylenko that in relation to the entire cost of the factory and
its equipment, this difference accounted for 3 percent of the total—
but no, again and again and again, he keeps on about the height of
the ceilings! And how did they dare install such powerful ventilators?
They took into account the hottest summer days. Why the hottest days?
So what! Let the workers sweat a little on the hottest days!

And in the meantime: “The disproportions were inherent. . . .
Bungling organization saw to that before there was any ‘Engineers
Center.’ ” (Charnovsky.)?? “No wrecking activities were ever neces-
sary. ... All one had to do was carry out the appropriate actions and
everything would happen on its own.” (Charnovsky again.)1* He
could not have expressed himself more clearly. And he said this after
many months in the Lubyanka and from the defendants’ bench in

11. Ibid., p. 365.
12. Ibid., p. 204.
13. Ibid., p. 202.

382 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

court. The appropriate actions—i.e., those imposed by bungling
higher-ups—were quite enough: carry them out and the unthinkable
plan would destroy itself. Here was their kind of wrecking: “We had
the capability of producing, say, 1,000 tons and we were ordered [in
other words, by a nonsensical plan] to produce 3,000, so we took no
steps to produce them.”2* .

You must admit that for an official, double-checked, spruced-up
stenographic record in those years, this is not so little.

On many occasions Krylenko drives his actors to tones of
exhaustion, thanks to the nonsense they are compelled to grind
out over and over again . . . like a bad play in which the actor
is ashamed for the dramatist, and yet has to go on and on any-
way, to keep body and soul together.

Krylenko: “Do you agree?”

Fedotov: “I agree . . . even though in general I do not
think .. .”°

Krylenko: “Do you confirm this?”

Fedotov: “Properly speaking .. . in certain portions . . . and
so to speak, in general . . . yes.”?°

For the engineers (those who were still free, not yet imprisoned,
and who had to face the necessity of working cheerfully after the
defamation at the trial of their whole class), there was no way
out. They were damned if they did and damned if they didn’t. If
they went forward, it was wrong, and if they went backward, it
was wrong too. If they hurried, they were hurrying for the pur-
pose of wrecking. If they moved methodically, it meant wrecking
by slowing down tempos. If they were painstaking in develop-
ing some branch of industry, it was intentional delay, sabotage.
And if they indulged in capricious leaps, their intention was to
produce an imbalance for the purpose of wrecking. Using capital
for repairs, improvements, or capital readiness was tying up
capital funds. And if they allowed equipment to be used until
it broke down, it was a diversionary action! (In addition, the
interrogators would get all this information out of them by sub-
jecting them to sleeplessness and punishment cells and then de-

14. Ibid., p. 204.
15. Ibid., p. 425.
16. Ibid., p. 356.

The Law Matures | 383

manding that they give convincing examples of how they might
have carried on wrecking activities.)

“Give us a clear example! Give us a clear example of your
wrecking activity!” the impatient Krylenko urges them on.

(They will give you outstanding examples! Just wait! Soon
someone will write the history of the technology of those years!
He will give you examples—and negative examples. He will
evaluate for you all the convulsions of your epileptic “Five-Year
Plan in Four Years.” Then we will find out how much of the
people’s wealth and strength was squandered. Then we will find
out how all the best projects were destroyed, and how the worst
projects were carried out by the worst means. Well, yes, if the
Mao Tse-tung breed of Red Guard youths supervise brilliant
engineers, what good can come of it? Dilettante enthusiasts—
they were the ones who egged on their even stupider leaders. )

Yes, full details are a disservice. Somehow the more details
provided, the less the evil deeds seem to smell of execution.

But just a moment! We’ve not had everything yet! The most
important crimes all lie ahead! Here they are, here they come,
comprehensible and intelligible to every illiterate! The Promparty
(1) prepared the way for the Intervention; (2) took money from
the imperialists; (3) conducted espionage; (4) assigned cabinet
posts in a future government. |

And that did it! All mouths were shut. And all those who had
been expressing their reservations fell silent. And only the tramp-
ing of demonstrators could be heard, and the roars outside the
window: “Death! Death! Death!”

What about some more details? Why should you want more
details? Well, then, if that’s the way you want it; but they will
only be more frightening. They were all acting under orders from
the French General Staff. After all, France doesn’t have enough
worries, or difficulties, or party conflicts of its own, and it is
enough just to whistle, and, lo and behold, divisions will march.
... Intervention! First they planned it for 1928. But they couldn’t
come to an agreement, they couldn’t tie up all the loose ends.
All right, so they postponed it to 1930. But once more they
couldn’t agree among themselves. All right, 1931 then. And,
as a matter of fact, here’s how it was to go: France herself would
not fight but, as her commission for organizing the deal, would

384 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

take the Ukraine right bank as her share. England wouldn't
fight either, of course, but, in order to raise a scare, promised to
send her fleet into the Black Sea and into the Baltic—in return,
she would get Caucasian oil. The actual warriors would, for the
most part, be the following: 100,000 émigrés (true, they had
long since scattered to the four winds, but it would take only
a whistle to gather them all together again immediately); Poland
—for which she would get half the Ukraine; Rumania (whose
brilliant successes in World War I were famous—she was a
formidable enemy). And then there were Latvia and Estonia.
(These two small countries would willingly drop all the concerns
of their young governments and rush forth en masse to do battle. )
And the most frightening thing of all was the direction of the
main blow. How’s that? Was it already known? Yes! It would
begin from Bessarabia, and from there, keeping to the right bank
of the Dnieper, it would move straight on Moscow.” And at
that fateful moment, would not all our railroads certainly be
blown up? No, not at all. Bottlenecks would be created! And the
Promparty would also yank out the fuses in electric power sta-
tions, and the entire Soviet Union would be plunged into dark-
ness, and all our machinery would come to a halt, including the
textile machinery! And sabotage would be carried out. (Atten-
tion, defendants! You must not name your methods of sabotage,
nor the factories which were your objectives, nor the geographic
sites involved, until the closed session. And you must not name
names, whether foreign or our own!) Combine all this with the
fatal blow which will have been dealt the textile industry by that
time! Add the fact that the saboteurs will have constructed two
or three textile factories in Byelorussia which will serve as a
base of operations for the interventionists.** With the textile fac-
tories already in their hands, the interventionists would march
implacably on Moscow. But here was the cleverest part of the
whole plot: though they didn’t succeed in doing so, they had
wanted to drain the Kuban marshes and the Polesye swamps, and
the swamp near Lake Ilmen (Vyshinsky had forbidden them to
name the exact places, but one of the witnesses blurted them

17. Who drew that arrow for Krylenko on a cigarette pack—was it not
drawn by the same hand that thought up our entire defense strategy in 1941?
18. Protsess Prompartii, p. 356. This was not intended as a joke.

The Law Matures | 385

out), and then the interventionists would open up the shortest
routes and would get to Moscow without wetting their feet or
their horses’ hoofs. (And why was it so hard for the Tatars?
Why was it that Napoleon didn’t reach Moscow? Yes! It was
because of the Polesye and the Ilmen swamps. And once those
swamps were drained, the capital would lie exposed.) On top
of that, don’t forget to add that hangars had been built there
under the guise of sawmills (places not to be named!) so that
the planes of the interventionists would not get wet in the rain
and could be taxied into them. And housing for the intervention-
ists had also been built (do not name the places!). (And where
had all the homeless occupation armies been quartered in previous
wars?) The defendants had received all the directives on these
matters from the mysterious foreign gentlemen K. and R. (It is
strictly forbidden to name their names—or to name the countries
they come from!)*® And most recently they had even begun “the
preparation of treasonable actions. by individual units of the Red
Army.” (Do not name the branches of the service, nor the units,
nor the names of any persons involved!) True, they hadn’t done
any of this; but they had also intended (though they hadn’t done
that either) to organize within some central army institution a
cell of financiers and former officers of the White armies. (Ah,
the White Army? Write it down! Start making arrests!) And cells
of anti-Soviet students. (Students? Write it down! Start making
arrests! )

(Incidentally, don’t push things too far. We wouldn’t want the
workers to get despondent and begin to feel that everything is
falling apart, that the Soviet government has been caught nap-
ping. And so they also threw a good deal of light on that side of
it: that they had intended to do a lot and had accomplished very
little, that not one industry had suffered serious losses!)

But why didn’t the Intervention take place anyway? For
various complex reasons. Either because Poincaré hadn’t been
elected in France, or else because our émigré industrialists
decided that their former enterprises had not yet been sufficiently
restored by the Bolsheviks—let the Bolsheviks do more. And
then, too, they couldn’t seem to come to terms with Poland and
Rumania.

19. Ibid., p. 409.

386 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

So, all right, there hadn’t been any intervention, but there
was, at least, a Promparty! Do you hear the tramp of marching
feet? Do you hear the murmur of the working masses: “Death!
Death! Death!”? And the marchers were “those who in the event
of war would have to atone with their deaths, and deprivations
and sufferings, for the work of these men.”*°

(And it was as if he had looked into a crystal ball: it was in-
deed with their deaths, and deprivations and sufferings, that those
trusting demonstrators would atone in 1941 for the work...
of these men! But where is your finger pointing, prosecutor? At
whom is your finger pointing? )

So then—why was it the Industrial Party? Why a party and
not an Engineering-Technical Center? We are accustomed to
having a Center!

Yes, there was a Center too. But they had decided to reorganize
themselves into a party. It was more respectable. That way it
would be easier to fight over cabinet posts in the future govern-
ment. It would “mobilize the engineering-technical masses for
the struggle for power.” And whom would they be struggling
against? Other parties, of course. Against the Working Peasants
Party—the TKP— in the first place, for after all they had 200,000
members! Against the Menshevik Party in the second place! And
as for a Center, those three parties together were to have con-
stituted a United Center. But the GPU had destroyed them. “And
it’s a good thing they destroyed us.” (All the defendants were
glad!)

(And it was flattering to Stalin to annihilate three more parties.
Would there have been any glory, indeed, in merely adding
another three “Centers” to his list?)

And having a party instead of a Center meant having another
Central Committee—yes, the Promparty’s own Central Com-
mittee! True, there had not been any party conferences, nor
had there been any elections, not even one. Whoever wanted
to be on the Central Committee just joined up—five people all
told. They all made way for one another, and they all yielded the
post of chairman to one another too. There were no meetings—
either of the Central Committee (no one else would remember
this, but Ramzin would remember it very well indeed, and he

20. Ibid., p. 437.

The Law Matures | 387

would name names) or of the groups from various branches
of industry. There seemed even to be some dearth of members.
As Charnovsky said, “There never was any formal organization
of a Promparty.” And how many members had there been?
Larichev: “A count of members would have been difficult; the
exact composition was unknown.” And how had they carried
out their wrecking? How had directives been communicated?
Well, it was just a matter of whoever met whomever in some
particular institution—directives were passed on orally. From
then on everyone would carry out his own wrecking on his own
conscience. (Well, now, Ramzin confidently named two thou-
sand members. And whenever he named two, they arrested five.
According to the documents in the trial, there were altogether
thirty to forty thousand engineers throughout the U.S.S.R. That
meant they would arrest every seventh one, and terrify the other
six.) And what about contacts with the Working Peasants Party?
Well, they might meet in the State Planning Commission, or else
in the Supreme Council of the Economy, and “plan systematic
acts against village Communists.”

Where have we seen all this before? Aha! In Aida. They are
seeing Radames off on his campaign, and the orchestra is thun-
dering, and eight warriors are standing there in helmets and with
spears—and two thousand more are painted on the backdrop.

That’s your Promparty.

But that’s all right. It works. The show goes on! (Today it is
quite impossible to believe just how threatening and serious it all
looked at the time.) And it is hammered in by repetition, and
every individual episode is gone over several times. And be-
cause of this the awful visions multiply. And, in addition, so that
things won’t become too bland, the defendants suddenly “forget”
something terribly unimportant, or else they “try to renounce
testimony”—and right then and there “they pin them down with
cross-questioning,” and it all winds up being as lively as the
Moscow Art Theatre.

But Krylenko pressed too hard. On the one hand he planned
to disembowel the Promparty—to disclose its social basis. That
was a question of class, and his analysis couldn’t go wrong. But
Krylenko abandoned the Stanislavsky method, didn’t assign the
roles, relied on improvisation. He let everyone tell his own story

388 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

of his own life, and what his relationship to the Revolution had
been, and how he was led to participate in wrecking.

And, in one fell swoop, that thoughtless insertion, that human
picture, spoiled all five acts.

The first thing that we learn to our astonishment is that all
eight of these big shots of the bourgeois intelligentsia came from
poor families: the son of a peasant; one of the many children
of a clerk; the son of an artisan; the son of a rural schoolteacher;
the son of a peddler. At school, they were all impoverished and
earned the money for their education themselves, from the ages
of twelve, thirteen, and fourteen. Some gave lessons, and some
worked on locomotives. And here was what was monstrous: no
one barred their way to an education! They all completed the
courses in high school and in higher technological institutions,
and they became important and famous professors. (How could
that have been? They always told us that under Tsarism only the
children of landowners and capitalists . . . Those calendars cer-
tainly couldn’t have been lying! )

And here and now, in the Soviet period, engineers were in a
very difficult position. It was almost impossible for them to
provide their children with a higher education (after all, the
children of the intelligentsia had the lowest priority, remember! ).
The court didn’t argue, nor did Krylenko. (And the defendants
themselves hastened to qualify what they had said, asserting that,
against the background of the general and over-all victories, this,
of course, was unimportant.)

Here we begin to distinguish bit by bit among the defendants,
who, up to this point, had talked very much like one another.
Their age differential also divided them with respect to probity.
Those close to sixty and older made statements that aroused a
friendly, sympathetic reaction. But forty-three-year-old Ramzin
and Larichev, and thirty-nine-year-old Ochkin (the same one
who had denounced Glavtop—the Main Fuels Committee—in
1921), were glib and shameless. And all the major testimony
about the Promparty and intervention comes from them. Ramzin
was the kind of person (as a result of his early and extraordinary
successes) who was shunned by the entire engineering profession,
and he endured it. At the trial he caught Krylenko’s hints on the
wing and volunteered precise statements. All the charges were

The Law Matures | 389

founded on Ramzin’s recollections. He possessed such self-control
and force that he might very well have conducted plenipotentiary
talks in Paris about intervention (on assignment from the GPU,
obviously). Ochkin, too, was a fast climber: at twenty-nine he
had already possessed “the unlimited trust of the Council of Labor
and Defense and the Council of People’s Commissars.”

One couldn’t say the same about sixty-two-year-old Professor
Charnovsky: Anonymous students had persecuted him in the
wall newspapers. After twenty-three years of lecturing, he had
been summoned to a general students’ meeting to “give an
account of his work.” He hadn’t gone.

And in 1921 Professor Kalinnikov had headed an open
struggle against the Soviet government—specifically a professors’
strike. What it amounted to was this: Back in the days of the
Stolypin repression, the Moscow Higher Technical School had
won academic autonomy (including the right to fill important
posts, elect a rector, etc.). In 1921 the professors in this school
had re-elected Kalinnikov to a new term as rector, but the People’s
Commissariat didn’t want him there and had designated its own
candidate. However, the professors went on strike and were
supported by the students—at that time there were no truly
proletarian students—and Kalinnikov was rector for a whole year
despite the wishes of the Soviet government. (It was only in 1922
that they had wrung the neck of that autonomy, and even then,
in all probability, not without arrests.)

Fedotov was sixty-six years old and he had been a factory
engineer eleven years longer than the whole life span of
the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party—from which the
Soviet Communist Party had sprung. He had worked at all the
spinning mills and textile factories in Russia. (How hateful such
people are, and how desirable it is to get rid of them as quickly
as possible!) In 1905 he had left his position as a director of
the Morozov textile firm and the high salary which went with it
because he preferred to attend the “Red Funerals” which fol-
lowed the caskets of the workers killed by the Cossacks. And now
he was ill, had poor eyesight, and was too weak to leave home at
night even to go to the theater.

And such people organized intervention? And economic ruin?

Charnovsky had not had any free evenings for many years be-

390 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

cause he had been so busy with his teaching and with developing
new sciences—such as the science of the organization of produc-
tion and the scientific principles of rationalization. I recall from
my own childhood the engineering professors of those years, and
that’s exactly what they were like. Their evenings were given
up to their students at all levels, and they didn’t get home to
their families until 11 p.m. After all, at the beginning of the
Five-Year Plan there were only thirty thousand of them for the
whole country. They were all strained to the breaking point.

And it was these people who were supposed to have con-
trived a crisis, to have spied in exchange for handouts?

Ramzin uttered just one honest phrase during the whole trial:
“The path of wrecking is alien to the inner structure of engineer-
ing.”

Throughout the trial Krylenko forced the defendants to con-
cede apologetically that they were “scarcely conversant” with or
were “illiterate” in politics. After all, politics is much more diff-
cult and much loftier than some kind of metallurgy or turbine
design. In politics your head won’t help you, nor will your educa-
tion. Come on! Answer me! What was your attitude toward the
October Revolution when it happened? Skeptical. In other words,
immediately hostile. Why? Why? Why?

Krylenko hounded them with his theoretical questions—and
as a result of simple human slips of the tongue inconsistent with
their assigned roles, the nucleus of the truth is disclosed to us—
as to what really had taken place and from what the entire bubble
had been blown.

What the engineers had first seen in the October coup d’état
was ruin. (And for three years there had truly been ruin and
nothing else.) Beyond that, they had seen the loss of even the
most elementary freedoms. (And these freedoms never returned. )
How, then, could engineers not have wanted a democratic repub-
lic? How could engineers accept the dictatorship of the workers,
the dictatorship of their subordinates in industry, so little skilled
or trained and comprehending neither the physical nor the eco-
nomic laws of production, but now occupying the top positions,
from which they supervised the engineers? Why shouldn’t the
engineers have considered it more natural for the structure of
society to be headed by those who could intelligently direct its
activity? (And, excepting only the question of the moral leader-

The Law Matures | 391

ship of society, is not this precisely where all social cybernetics
is leading today? Is it not true that professional politicians are
boils on the neck of society that prevent it from turning its head
and moving its arms?) And why shouldn’t engineers have politi-
cal views? After all, politics is not even a science, but is an em-
pirical area not susceptible to description by any mathematical
apparatus; furthermore, it is an area subject to human egotism
and blind passion. (Even in the trial Charnovsky speaks out:
“Politics must, nonetheless, be guided to some degree by the
findings of technology.”)

The wild pressures of War Communism could only sicken the
engineers. An engineer cannot participate in irrationality, and
until 1920 the majority of them did nothing, even though they
were barbarically impoverished. When NEP—the New Eco-
nomic Policy—got under way, the engineers willingly went back
to work. They accepted NEP as an indication that the govern-
ment had come to its senses. But, alas, conditions were not what
they had been. The engineers were looked on as a socially sus-
picious element that did not even have the right to provide an
education for its own children. Engineers were paid immeasur-
ably low salaries in proportion to their contribution to produc-
tion. But while their superiors demanded successes in production
from them, and discipline, they were deprived of the authority to
impose this discipline. Any worker could not only refuse to
carry out the instructions of an engineer, but could insult and
even strike him and go unpunished—and as a representative of
the ruling class the worker was always right in such a case.

Krylenko objects: “Do you remember the Oldenborger trial?”
(In other words, how we, so to speak, defended him.)

Fedotov: “Yes. He had to lose his life in order to attract some
attention to the predicament of the engineer.”

Krylenko (disappointed): “Well, that was not how the matter
was put.”

Fedotov: “He died and he was not the only one to die. He
died voluntarily, and many others were killed.””*

Krylenko was silent. That meant it was true. (Leaf through
the Oldenborger trial again, and just imagine the persecution.
And with the additional final line: “Many other were killed.” )

21. Ibid., p. 228.

392 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

So it was that the engineer was to blame for everything, even
when he had done nothing wrong. But if he actually had made
a real mistake, and after all he was a human being, he would be
torn to pieces unless his colleagues could manage to cover things
up. For would they value honesty? So the engineers then were
forced at times to lie to the Party leadership?

To restore their authority and prestige, the engineers really
had to unite among themselves and help each other out. They
were all in danger. But they didn’t need any kind of conference,
any membership cards, to achieve such unity. Like every kind
of mutual understanding between intelligent and clear-thinking
people, it was attained by a few quiet, even accidental words; no
kind of voting was called for. Only narrow minds need resolu-
tions and the Party stick. (And this was something Stalin could
never understand, nor could the interrogators, nor their whole
crowd. They had never had any experience of human relation-
ships of that kind. They had never seen anything like that in
Party history!) In any case, that sort of unity had long existed
among Russian engineers in their big illiterate nation of petty
tyrants. It had already been tested for several decades. But now
a new government had discovered it and become alarmed.

Then came 1927. And the rationality of the NEP period went
up in smoke. And it turned out that the entire NEP was merely
a cynical deceit. Extravagantly unrealistic projections of a super-
industrial forward leap had been announced; impossible plans
and tasks had been assigned. In those conditions, what was there
for the collective engineering intelligence to do—the engineering
leadership of the State Planning Commission and the Supreme
Council of the Economy? To submit to insanity? To stay on the
sidelines? It would have cost them nothing. One can write any
figures one pleases on a piece of paper. But “our comrades, our
colleagues in actual production, will not be able to fulfill these
assignments.” And that meant it was necessary to try to intro-
duce some moderation into these plans, to bring them under the
control of reason, to eliminate entirely the most outrageous
assignments. To create, so to speak, their own State Planning
Commission of engineers in order to correct the stupidities of
the leaders. And the most amusing thing was that this was in
their interests—the interests of the leaders—too. And in the
interests of all industry and of all the people, since ruinous

The Law Matures | 393

decisions could be avoided, and squandered, scattered millions
could be picked up from the ground. To defend quality—‘“the
heart of technology”—amid the general uproar about quantity,
planning, and overplanning. And to indoctrinate students with
this spirit.

That’s what it was, the thin, delicate fabric of the truth. That
is what it really was.

But to utter such thoughts aloud in 1930 meant being shot.

And yet it was still too little and too invisible to arouse the
wrath of the mob.

It was therefore necessary to reprocess the silent and redeem-
ing collusion of the engineers into crude wrecking and inter-
vention.

Thus, in the picture they substituted, we nonetheless caught
a fleshless—and fruitless—vision of the truth. The work of the
stage director began to fall apart. Fedotov had already blurted
out something about sleepless nights (!) during the eight months
of his imprisonment; and about some important official of the
GPU who had recently shaken his hand (?) (so there must have
been a deal: you play your roles, and the GPU will carry out its
promises?). And even the witnesses, though their role was in-
comparably less important, began to get confused.

Krylenko: “Did you participate in this group?”

Witness Kirpotenko: “Two or three times, when questions
of intervention were being considered.”

And that was just what was needed!

Krylenko (encouragingly): “Go on.”

Kirpotenko (a pause): “Other than that nothing is known.”

Krylenko urges him on, tries to give him his cue again.

Kirpotenko (stupidly): “Other than intervention nothing is
known to me.”??

Then, when there was an actual confrontation with Kupri-
yanov, the facts no longed jibed. Krylenko got angry, and he
shouted at the inept prisoners:

“Then you just have to fix things so you come up with the same
answers.”

And in the recess, behind the scenes, everything was once
more brought up to snuff. All the defendants were once again
nervously awaiting their cues. And Krylenko prompted all eight

22. Ibid., p. 354.

394 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

of them at once: the émigré industrialists had published an
article abroad to the effect that they had held no talks at all with
Ramzin and Larichev and knew nothing whatever about any
Promparty, and that the testimony of the witnesses had in all
likelihood been forced from them by torture. Well, what are you
going to say to that?

Good Lord! How outraged the defendants were! They
clamored for the floor without waiting their turns. What had
become of that weary calm with which they had humiliated
themselves and their colleagues for seven days? Boiling indigna-
tion at those émigrés burst from them. They demanded permis-
sion to send a written declaration to the newspapers in defense of
GPU methods. (Now, wasn’t that an embellishment? Wasn’t
that a jewel?) And Ramzin declared: “Our presence here is
sufficient proof that we were not subjected to tortures and tor-
ments!” (And what, pray tell, would be the use of tortures that
made it impossible for the defendants to appear in court!) And
Fedotov: “Imprisonment did me good and not only me... . I
even feel better in prison than in freedom.” And Ochkin: “Me
too. I feel better too!”

It was out of sheer generosity that Krylenko and Vyshinsky
declined their offer of a collective declaration. They certainly
would have written one! And they certainly would have signed
it!

But maybe someone had some lingering suspicions still? Well,
in that case, Comrade Krylenko vouchsafed them a flash of his
brilliant logic. “If we should admit even for one second that
these people were telling untruths, then why were they arrested
and why did they all at once start babbling their heads off?””*

Now that is the power of logic for you! For a thousand years
prosecutors and accusers had never even imagined that the fact
of arrest might in itself be a proof of guilt. If the defendants
were innocent, then why had they been arrested? And once they
had been arrested, that meant they were guilty! |

And, indeed, why had they started babbling away?

“The question of torture we discard! . . . But let us put the
question psychologically: Why did they confess? And I ask you:
What else could they have done?”**

23. Ibid., p. 452.
24. Ibid., p. 454.

The Law Matures | 395

Well, how true! How psychological! If you ever served time
in that institution, just recollect: what else was there to do?

(Ivanov-Razumnik wrote” that in 1938 he was imprisoned in
the same cell in the Butyrki as Krylenko, and that Krylenko’s
place in the cell was under the board bunks. I can picture that
vividly—since I have crawled there myself. The bunks were so
low that the only way one could crawl along the dirty asphalt
floor was flat on one’s stomach, but newcomers could never
adapt and would try to crawl on all fours. They would manage
to get their heads under, but their rear ends would be left stick-
ing out. And it is my opinion that the supreme prosecutor had a
particularly difficult time adapting, and I imagine that his rear
end, not yet grown thin, used to stick out there for the greater
glory of Soviet justice. Sinful person that I am, I visualize with
malice that rear end sticking out there, and through the whole
long description of these trials it somehow gives me solace. )

Yes, the prosecutor expounded, continuing along the same
line, if all this about tortures was true, then it was impossible to
understand what could have induced all the defendants to con-
fess, unanimously and in chorus, without any arguments and
deviations. Just where could such colossal collusion have been
carried out? After all, they had no chance to communicate with
each other during the interrogation period.

(Several pages further along, a witness who survived will tell
us where.)

Now it is not for me to tell the reader but for the reader to |
tell me just what the notorious “riddle of the Moscow trials of
the thirties” consisted of. At first people were astounded at the
Promparty trial, and then that riddle was transferred to the trials
of the Party leaders.

After all, they didn’t put on trial in open court the two
thousand who had been dragged into it, or even two or three
hundred, but only eight people. It is not as hard as all that to
direct a chorus of eight. And as for his choices, Krylenko was
free to choose from thousands over a period of two years. Pal-
chinsky had not been broken, but had been shot—and posthum-
ously named “the leader of the Promparty,” which is what he
was Called in the testimony, even though no word of his survived.

25. Ivanov-Razumnik, Tyurmy i Ssylki (Prisons and Exiles), New York,
Chekhov Publishing House, 1953.

396 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

And they had hoped to beat what they wanted out of Khrenni-
kov, and Khrennikov didn’t yield to them either; therefore he
appeared just once in the record—in a footnote in small type:
“Khrennikov died during the course of his interrogation.” The
small type you are using is for fools, but we at least know,
and we will write it in double-sized letters: TORTURED TO
DEATH DURING INTERROGATION. He, too, was posthum-
ously named a leader of the Promparty, but there wasn’t one
least little fact from him, not one tiny piece of testimony in the
general chorus, not one. Because he did not give even one! (And
then all at once Ramzin appeared! He was a find. What energy
and what a grasp! And he was ready to do anything in order to
live! And what talent! He had been arrested only at the end of
the summer, just before the trial really—and he not only man-
aged to enter fully into his role, but it seemed as though he had
written the whole play. He had absorbed a whole mountain of
interrelated material, and he could serve it up spick-and-span,
any name at all, any fact at all. And sometimes he manifested
the languid ornateness of a bigwig scientist: “The activity of the
Promparty was so widespread that even in the course of an
eleven-day trial there is no opportunity to disclose it in total
detail.”) (In other words, go on and look for it, look further!)
“I am firmly convinced that a small anti-Soviet stratum still
exists in engineering circles.” (Go get ’em, go get em, grab some
more!) And how capable he was: he knew that it was a riddle,
and that a riddle must be given an artistic explanation. And,
unfeeling as a stick of wood, he found then and there within
himself “the traits of the Russian criminal, for whom purification
lay in public recantation before all the people.””®

So what it comes down to is that all Krylenko and the GPU
had to do was select the right people. But the risk was small.
Goods spoiled in interrogation could always be sent off to the
grave. And whoever managed to get through both the frying pan
and the fire could always be given medical treatment and be
fattened up, and put on public trial!

26. Ramzin has been undeservedly neglected in Russian memories. In my
view, he fully deserved to become the prototype of a cynical and dazzling
traitor. The Bengal fire of betrayal! He wasn’t the only such villain of this
epoch, but he was certainly a prominent case.

The Law Matures | 397

So then where is the riddle? How they were worked over? Very
simply: Do you want to live? (And even those who don’t care
about themselves care about their children or grandchildren. )
Do you understand that it takes absolutely no effort to have you
shot, without your ever leaving the courtyards of the GPU? (And
there was no doubt whatever about that. Whoever hadn’t yet
learned it would be given a course in being ground down by the
Lubyanka.) But it is useful both for you and for us to have you
act out a certain drama, the text for which you, as specialists,
are going to write yourselves, and we, as prosecutors, are going
to learn by heart . . . and we will try to remember the technical
terms. (Krylenko sometimes made mistakes during the trial. He
said “freight car axle” instead of “locomotive axle.”) It will be
unpleasant to perform and you will feel ashamed, but you just
have to suffer through it. After all, it is better to live. And what
assurance have we that you won’t shoot us afterward? Why
should we take vengeance on you? You are excellent specialists
and you have not committed any crimes and we value you. Look
at how many wrecking trials there have been; you'll see that
no one who behaved has been shot. (Mercy for the defendants
who cooperated in one trial was an important prerequisite for
the success of the next. And hope was transmitted via this chain
right up to Zinoviev and Kamenev themselves.) But the under-
standing is that you have to carry out all our conditions to the
very last! The trial must work for the good of socialist society.

And the defendants would fulfill all the conditions.

Thus they served up all the subtlety of engineers’ intellectual
Opposition as dirty wrecking on a level low enough to be com-
prehensible to the last illiterate in the country. (But they had not
yet descended to the level of ground glass in the food of the
workers. The prosecutors had not yet thought that one up.)

A further theme was ideological motivation. Had they begun
to wreck? It was the result of a hostile motivation. And now they
jointly collaborated in confessing? It was once again the result
of ideological motivation, for they had been converted (in
prison) by the blazing blast-furnace face of the third year of the
Five-Year Plan! Although in their last words they begged for
their lives, that wasn’t the main thing for them. (Fedotov: “There
is no forgiveness for us. The prosecutor is right!”) The main

398 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

thing for these strange defendants right at that moment, on the
threshold of death, was to convince the people and the whole
world of the infallibility and farsightedness of the Soviet govern-
ment. Ramzin, in particular, glorified the “revolutionary con-
sciousness of the proletarian masses and their leaders,” who had
been “able to find immeasurably more dependable paths of
economic policy” than the scientists, and who had calculated the
tempos of economic growth rate far more correctly. And then:
“I had come to understand it was necessary to make a jump
ahead, and that it was necessary to make a leap forward,” that
it was necessary to capture by storm,” etc., etc. And Larichev
declared: “The Soviet Union is invincible against the weakening
capitalist world.” And Kalinnikov: “The dictatorship of the pro-
letariat is an inevitable necessity.” And further: “The interests
of the people and the interests of the Soviet government merge
into one purposeful whole.” Yes, and in addition, in the country-
side “the general line of the Party, the destruction of the kulaks,
is correct.” They had time, while awaiting execution, to deliver
themselves of judgments about everything. And the repenting
intellectuals even had enough voice for such a prophecy as this:
“In proportion to the development of society, individual life is
going to become more circumscribed. . . . Collective will is the
highest form.””*

Thus it was that with eight-horse traction all the goals of the
trial were attained:

1. All the shortages in the country, including famine, cold,
lack of clothing, chaos, and obvious stupidities, were blamed on
the engineer-wreckers.

2. The people were terrified by the threat of imminent inter-
vention from abroad and therefore prepared for new sacrifices.

3. Leftist circles in the West were warned of the intrigues of
their governments.

4. The solidarity of the engineers was destroyed; all the in-
telligentsia was given a good scare and left divided within itself.
And so that there should be no doubt about it, this purpose of
the trial was once more clearly proclaimed by Ramzin:

27. Protsess Prompartii, p. 504. And that is how they were talking here in
the Soviet Union, in our own country, in 1930, when Mao Tse-tung was still

a stripling.
28. Ibid., p. 510.

The Law Matures | 399

“I would like to see that, in consequence of the present trial of
the Promparty, the dark and shameful past of the entire intelli-
gentsia will be buried once and for all.”

Larichev joined in: “This caste must be destroyed! . . . There
is not and there cannot be loyalty among engineers!™ And Och-
kin too: The intelligentsia “is some kind of mush. As the state
accuser has said, it has no backbone, and this constitutes un-
conditional spinelessness. . ... How immeasurably superior is the
sensitivity of the proletariat.”**

So now just why should such diligent collaborators be shot?

And that was the way the history of our intelligentsia has been
written for decades—from the anathema of 1920 (the reader
will remember: “not the brains of the nation, but shit,” and “the
ally of the black generals,” and “the hired agent of imperialism” )
right up to the anathema of 1930.

So should anyone be surprised that the word “intelligentsia”
got established here in Russia as a term of abuse.

That is how the public trials were manufactured. Stalin’s
searching mind had once and for all attained its ideal. (Those
blunderheads Hitler and Goebbels would come to envy it and rush
into their shameful failure with the burning of the Reichstag.)

The standard had been set, and now it could be retained
perennially and performed over again every season—according
to the wishes of the Chief Producer. And in fact the Chief wanted
another within three months. The rehearsal time was very short,
but that was all right. Come and see the show! Only in our
theater! A premiere.

M. The Case of the All-Union Bureau of the Mensheviks—
March 1-9, 1931

The case was heard by a Special Assize of the Supreme Court,
the presiding judge in this case, for some reason, being N. M.
Shvernik. Otherwise everyone was in his proper place—Antonov-
Saratovsky, Krylenko, and his assistant Roginsky. The pro-

29. Ibid., p. 49.
30. Ibid., p. 508.

31. Ibid., p. 509. For some reason, the main thing about the proletariat is
always, believe it or not, sensitivity. Always via the nostrils.

400 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

ducers were sure of themselves. For after all, the subject wasn’t
technical but was Party material, ordinary stuff. So they brought
fourteen defendants onto the stage.

And it all went off not just smoothly but brilliantly.

I was twelve at the time. For three years I had been attentively
reading everything about politics on the enormous pages of
Izvestiya. I read the stenographic records of these two trials line
by line. In the Promparty case, I had already felt, in my boyish
heart, superfluity, falsehood, fabrication, but at least there were
spectacular stage sets—universal intervention, the paralysis of
all industry, the distribution of ministerial portfolios! In the
trial of the Mensheviks, all the same stage sets were brought out,
but they were more pallid. And the actors spoke their lines with-
out enthusiasm. And the whole performance was a yawning bore,
an inept, tired repetition. (Could it be that Stalin felt this, too,
through his rhinoceros hide? How else can one explain his call-
ing off the case of the Working Peasants Party after it had
already been prepared, or why there were no more trials for
several years?)

It would be boring to base our interpretations once again on
the stenographic record. In any case, I have fresher evidence
from one of the principal defendants in this case—Mikhail
Petrovich Yakubovich. At the present moment, his petition for
rehabilitation, exposing all the dirty work which went on, has
filteted through to samizdat, our savior, and people are reading
it just as it happened.” His story offers material proof and ex-
planation of the whole chain of Moscow trials of the thirties.

How was the nonexistent “Union Bureau” created? The GPU
had been given an assignment: they had been told to prove that
the Mensheviks had adroitly wormed their way into—and seized
—many important government jobs for counterrevolutionary
purposes. The genuine situation did not jibe with this plan. There
were no real Mensheviks in important posts. But then there were
no real Mensheviks on trial either. (True, they say V. K. Ikov

32. He was refused rehabilitation. After all, the case in which he was tried
had entered the golden tables of our history. After all, one cannot take back
even one stone, because the entire building might collapse. Thus it is that
M.P.Y. still has his conviction on his record. However, for his consolation,
he has been granted a personal pension for his revolutionary activity! What
monstrosities exist in our country.

The Law Matures | 401

actually was a member of the quiet, do-nothing illegal Moscow
Bureau of the Mensheviks—but they didn’t know that at the
trial. He was processed in the second echelon and received a
mere eight.) The GPU had its own design: two from the Supreme
Council of the Economy, two from the People’s Commissariat
of Trade, two from the State Bank, one from the Central Union
of Consumer Cooperatives, one from the State Planning Com- —
mission. (What a boring and unoriginal plan! Back in 1920,
they had ordered, in the matter of the “Tactical Center,” that it
include two from the Union of Rebirth, two from the Council of
Public Figures, two from this and that, etc.) Therefore they
picked the individuals who suited them on the basis of their
positions. And whether they were Mensheviks or not depended
on whether one believed rumors. Some who got caught this way
were not Mensheviks at all, but directives had been given to
consider them Mensheviks. The genuine political views of those
accused did not interest the GPU in the least. Not all the de-
fendants even knew each other. And they raked in Menshevik
witnesses, too, wherever they could find them.** (All the wit-
nesses, without exception, were later given prison terms too.)
Ramzin testified prolifically and obligingly at this trial also. But
the GPU pinned its hopes on the principal defendant, Vladimir
Gustavovich Groman (with the idea that he would help work up
this case and be amnestied in return), and on the provocateur
Petunin. (I am basing all this on Yakubovich’s report.)

Let us now introduce M. P. Yakubovich. He had begun his
revolutionary activity so early that he had not even finished the
gymnasium. In March, 1917, he was already Chairman of the
Smolensk Soviet. Impelled by the strength of his convictions,
which continued to lead him on, he became a strong and success-
ful orator. At the Congress of the Western Front, he impetuously
called those journalists who were demanding that the war con-
tinue enemies of the people. And this was in April, 1917. He was

33. One was Kuzma A. Gvozdev, a man whose fate was bitter. This was
the same Gvozdev who had been chairman of the workers’ group in the War
Industry Committee, and whom the Tsarist government, in an excess of
stupidity, had arrested in 1916, and the February Revolution had made Min-
ister of Labor. Gvozdev became one of the martyr long-termers of Gulag. I
do not know how many years he had been imprisoned before 1930, but from

1930 on he was in prison continuously, and my friends knew him in Spassk
Camp, in Kazakhstan, as late as 1952.

402 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

nearly hauled from the rostrum, and he apologized, but there-
after in his speech he maneuvered so adroitly and so won over
his listeners that at the end he called them enemies of the people
again, and this time to stormy applause. He was elected to the
delegation sent to the Petrograd Soviet, and hardly had he
arrived there than—with the informality of those days—he was
named to the Military Commission of the Petrograd Soviet. There
he exerted a strong influence on the appointment of army com-
missars,** and in the end he became an army commissar on the
Southwestern Front and personally arrested Denikin in Vinnitsa
(after the Kornilov revolt), and regretted very much indeed
(during the trial as well) that he had not shot him on the spot.

Clear-eyed, always sincere, and always completely absorbed
in his own ideas—whether they were right or wrong—he was
counted as—and was—one of the younger members of the Men-
shevik Party. This did not prevent him, however, from presenting
his own. projects to the Menshevik leadership with boldness and
passion, such as, in the spring of 1917, proposing the formation
of a Social Democratic government, or, in 1919, recommending
that the Mensheviks enter the Comintern. (Dan and the others
invariably rejected all his plans and their variations, and quite
condescendingly, for that matter.) In July, 1917, he was very
pained by the action of the socialist Petrograd Soviet in approv-
ing the Provisional Government's calling up army units for use
against other socialists, considering it a fatal error even though
the other socialists were using armed force. Hardly had the Octo-
ber coup taken place than Yakubovich proposed to his party
that it should support the Bolsheviks wholeheartedly and work
to improve the state structure they were creating. In the upshot,
he was finally ostracized by Martov, and by 1920 he had left the
ranks of the Mensheviks once and for all, convinced that he
- could not get them to follow the Bolsheviks’ path.

I have gone into all this detail to make it quite clear that
throughout the Revolution Yakubovich had been not a Men-
shevik but a Bolshevik, and one who was entirely sincere and
disinterested. In 1920 he was still one of the Smolensk food-
supply commissars, and the only one of them who was not a

34. He is not to be confused with Colonel Yakubovich of the General Staff,
who, at the same time and the same meetings, represented the War Ministry.

The Law Matures | 403

Bolshevik. He was even honored by the People’s Commissariat
of Food Supply as the best. (He claims that he got along without
reprisals against the peasantry, but I do not know whether or
not this is true. At his trial he did, however, recall that he had
organized “antispeculation” detachments.) In the twenties he
had edited the Torgovaya Gazeta (The Trade Gazette) and had
occupied other important posts. He had been arrested in 1930
when just such Mensheviks as he, “who had wormed their way
in,” were to be rounded up in accordance with the GPU plans.

He had immediately been called in for questioning by Krylen-
ko, who, earlier and always, as the reader already knows, was
organizing the chaos of the preliminary inquiry into efficient
interrogation. It turned out that they knew one another very
well, for in the years between the first trials Krylenko had gone
to that very Smolensk Province to improve food-requisition work.
And here is what Krylenko now said:

“Mikhail Petrovich, I am going to talk to you frankly: I con-
sider you a Communist! [His words encouraged Yakubovich and
raised his spirits greatly.] Z have no doubt of your innocence.
But it is our Party duty, yours and mine, to carry out this trial.
[Krylenko had gotten his orders from Stalin, and Yakubovich
was all atremble for the sake of the cause, like a zealous horse
rushing into the horse collar.] I beg you to help me in every
possible way, and to assist the interrogation. And in case of un-
foreseen difficulties during the trial, at the most difficult moments,
I will ask the chairman of the court to give you the floor.”

1111

And Yakubovich promised. Conscious of his duty, he
promised. Indeed, the Soviet government had never before given
him such a responsible assignment.

And thus there was not the slightest need even to touch
Yakubovich during the interrogation. But that was too subtle
for the GPU. Like everyone else, Yakubovich was handed over
to the butcher-interrogators, and they gave him the full treatment
—the freezing punishment cell, the hot box, beating his genitals.
They tortured him so intensively that Yakubovich and his fellow
defendant Abram Ginzburg opened their veins in desperation.
After they had received medical attention, they were no longer
tortured and beaten. Instead, the only thing to which they were

404 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

subjected was two weeks of sleeplessness. (Yakubovich says:
“Just to be allowed to sleep! Neither conscience nor honor matters
any longer.”) And then they were confronted with others who
had already given in and who urged them to “confess” . . . to
utter nonsense. And the interrogator himself, Aleksei Alekseye-
vich Nasedkin, said: “I know, I know, none of this actually
happened! But they insist on it!”

On one occasion when Yakubovich had been summoned to
interrogation, he found there a prisoner who had been tortured.
The interrogator smiled ironically: “Moisei Isayevich Teitel-
baum begs you to take him into your anti-Soviet organization.
You can speak as freely as you please. I am going out for a
while.” He went out. Teitelbaum really did beg: “Comrade
Yakubovich! I beg you, please take me into your Union Bureau
of Mensheviks! They are accusing me of taking ‘bribes from
foreign firms’ and threatening me with execution. But I would
rather die a counterrevolutionary than a common criminal!” (It
was likelier that they had promised him that as a counter-
revolutionary he wouldn’t be shot! And he wasn’t wrong either:
they gave him a juvenile prison term, a “fiver.”) The GPU was
so short on Mensheviks they had to recruit defendants from
volunteers! (And, after all, Teitelbaum was being groomed for
an important role—communication with the Mensheviks abroad
and with the Second International! But they honorably kept the
deal they had made with him—a “fiver.”) And with the inter-
rogator’s approval Yakubovich accepted Teitelbaum as a mem-
ber of the Union Bureau.

Several days before the trial began, the first organizing session
of the Union Bureau of the Mensheviks convened in the office
of the senior interrogator, Dmitri Matveyevich Dmitriyev—so as
to coordinate things, and so that each should understand his own
role better. (That’s how the Central Committee of the Prom-
party convened too! That’s where the defendants “could have
met”—to answer Krylenko’s earlier leading question.) But such
a mountain of falsehood had been piled up that it was too much
to absorb in one session and the participants got things mixed
up, couldn’t master it in one rehearsal, and were called together
a second time.

What did Yakubovich feel as he went into the trial? Should

The Law Matures | 405

he not, in revenge for all the tortures to which he had been sub-
jected, for all the falsehood shoved into his breast, create a
sensational scandal and startle the world? But still:

1. To do so would be to stab the Soviet government in the
back! It would be to negate his entire purpose in life, everything
he had lived for, the whole path he had taken to extricate himself
from mistaken Menshevism and become a right-minded Bol-
shevik.

2. After a scandal like that they wouldn’t just allow him to
die; they wouldn’t just shoot him; they would torture him again,
but this time out of vengeance, and drive him insane. But his
body had already been exhausted by tortures. Where could he
find the moral strength to endure new ones? Where could he
unearth the required heroism?

(I wrote down his arguments as his heated words rang out—
this being a most extraordinary chance to get, so to speak, a
“posthumous” explanation from a participant in such a trial.
And I find that it is altogether as though Bukharin or Rykov
were explaining the reasons for their own mysterious submis-
siveness at their trials. Theirs were the same sincerity and
honesty, the same devotion to the Party, the same human weak-
ness, the same lack of the moral strength needed to fight back,
because they had no individual position.)

And at the trial Yakubovich not only repeated obediently all
the gray mass of lies which constituted the upper limit of Stalin’s
imagination—and the imagination of his apprentices and his
tormented defendants. But he also played out his inspired role,
as he had promised Krylenko.

The so-called Foreign Delegation of the Mensheviks—in es-
sence the entire top level of their Central Committee—formally
dissociated themselves from the defendants in a statement pub-
lished in Vorwärts. They declared there that the trial was a
shameful travesty, built on the testimony of provocateurs and
unfortunate defendants forced into it by terror; that the over-
whelming majority of the defendants had left the Party more
than ten years earlier and had never returned; and that absurdly
large sums of money were referred to at the trial, representing
more than the party had ever disposed of.

And Krylenko, having read the article, asked Shvernik to

406 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

permit the defendants to reply—the same kind of pulling-all-
strings-at-once he had resorted to at the trial of the Promparty.
They all spoke up, and they all defended the methods of the
GPU against the Menshevik Central Committee.

But what does Yakubovich remember today about his “reply”
and his last speech? He recalls that he not only spoke as befitted
his promise to Krylenko, but that instead of simply getting to his
feet, he was seized and lifted up—like a chip on a wave—by a
surge of anger and oratory. Anger against whom? After having
learned what torture meant, and attempting suicide and coming
close to death more than once, he was at this point in a real,
honest-to-God rage. But not at the prosecutor or the GPU! Oh,
no! At the Foreign Delegation of the Mensheviks!!! Now there’s
a psychological switch for you! There they sat, unscrupulous and
smug, in security and comfort—for even the poverty of émigré
life was, of course, comfort in comparison with the Lubyanka.
And how could they refuse to pity those who were on trial, their
torture and suffering? How could they so impudently dissociate
themselves from them and deliver these unfortunates over to their
fate? (The reply Yakubovich delivered was powerful, and the
people who had cooked up the trial were delighted.)

Fven when he was describing this in 1967, Yakubovich shook
with rage at the Foreign Delegation, at their betrayal, their
repudiation, their treason to the socialist Revolution—exactly
as he had reproached them in 1917.

I did not have the stenographic record of the trial at the time.
Later I found it and was astonished. Yakubovich’s memory—so
precise in every little detail, every date, every name—had in
this instance betrayed him. He had, after all, said at the trial that
the Foreign Delegation, on orders from the Second International,
had instructed them to carry out wrecking activities. He no longer
remembered this. The foreign Mensheviks’ statement was neither
unscrupulous nor smug. They had indeed pitied the unfortunate
victims of the trial but did point out that they had not been
Mensheviks for a long time—which was quite true. What was it,
then, that made Yakubovich so unalterably and sincerely angry?
And exactly how could the Foreign Delegation not have con-
signed the defendants to their fate?

We like to take our anger out on those who are weaker, those

The Law Matures | 407

who cannot answer. It is a human trait. And somehow the argu-
ments to prove we are right appear out of nowhere.

Krylenko said in his summation for the prosecution that
Yakubovich was a fanatic advocate of counterrevolutionary ideas
and demanded therefore that he be shot.

And Yakubovich that day felt a tear of gratitude roll down
his cheek, and he feels it still to this day, after having dragged
his way through many camps and detention prisons. Even today
he is grateful to Krylenko for not humiliating him, for not in-
sulting him, for not ridiculing him as a defendant, and for call-
ing him correctly a fanatic advocate (even of an idea contrary
to his real one) and for demanding simple, noble execution for
him, that would put an end to all his sufferings! In his final
statement, Yakubovich agreed with Krylenko himself: “The
crimes to which I have confessed [he endowed with great sig-
nificance his success in hitting on the expression ‘to which I have
confessed’—anyone who understood would realize that he meant
‘not those which I committed’] deserve the highest measure of
punishment—and I do not ask any forgiveness! I do not ask that
my life be spared!” (Beside him on the defendants’ bench, Gro-
man got excited! “You are insane! You have to consider your
comrades. You don’t have the right!”)

Now wasn’t he a find for the prosecutor?

And can one still say the trials of 1936 to 1938 are un-
explained?

Was it not through this trial that Stalin came to understand
and believe that he could readily round up all his loud-mouth
enemies and get them organized for just such a performance as
this?

And may my compassionate reader now have mercy on me!
Until now my pen sped on untrembling, my heart didn’t skip a
beat, and we slipped along unconcerned, because for these fifteen
years we have been firmly protected either by legal revolution-
ality or else by revolutionary legality. But from now on things
will be painful: as the reader will recollect, as we have had ex-
plained to us dozens of times, beginning with Khrushchev, “from

408 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

approximately 1934, violations of Leninist norms of legality
began.” And how are we to enter this abyss of illegality now?
How are we to drag our way along yet another bitter stretch of
the road?

However, these trials which follow were, because of the fame
of the defendants, a cynosure for the whole world. They did not
escape the attention of the public. They were written about. They
were interpreted and they will be interpreted again and again.
It is for us merely to touch lightly on their riddle.

Let us make one qualification, though not a big one; the
published stenographic records did not coincide completely with
what was said at the trials. One writer who received an entrance
pass—they were given out only to selected individuals—took
running notes and subsequently discovered these differences. All
the correspondents also noted the snag with Krestinsky, which
made a recess necessary in order to get him back on the track of
his assigned testimony. (Here is how I picture it. Before the trial
a chart was set up for emergencies: in the first column was the
name of the defendant; in the second, the method to be used
during the recess if he should depart from his text during the
open trial; in the third column, the name of the Chekist respon-
sible for applying the indicated method. So if Krestinsky de-
parted from his text, then who would come on the run and what
that person would do had already been arranged.)

But the inaccuracies of the stenographic record do not change
or lighten the picture. Dumfounded, the world watched three
plays in a row, three wide-ranging and expensive dramatic pro-
ductions in which the powerful leaders of the fearless Communist
Party, who had turned the entire world upside down and terrified
it, now marched forth like doleful, obedient goats and bleated
out everything they had been ordered to, vomited all over them-
selves, cringingly abased themselves and their convictions, and
confessed to crimes they could not in any wise have committed.

This was unprecedented in remembered history. It was par-
ticularly astonishing in contrast with the recent Leipzig trial of
Dimitrov. Dimitrov had answered the Nazi judges like a roaring
lion, and, immediately afterward, his comrades in Moscow, mem-
bers of that same unyielding cohort which had made the whole
world tremble—and the greatest of them at that, those who had

The Law Matures | 409

been called the “Leninist guard”’—came before the judges
drenched in their own urine.

And even though much appears to have been clarified since
then—with particular success by Arthur Koestler—the riddle
continues to circulate as durably as ever.

People have speculated about a Tibetan potion that deprives
a man of his will, and about the use of hypnosis. Such explana-
tions must by no means be rejected: if the NK VD possessed such
methods, clearly there were no moral rules to prevent resorting
to them. Why not weaken or muddle the will? And it is a known
fact that in the twenties some leading hypnotists gave up their
careers and entered the service of the GPU. It is also reliably
known that in the thirties a school for hypnotists existed in the
NKVD. Kamenev’s wife was allowed to visit her husband before
his trial and found him not himself, his reactions retarded. (And
she managed to communicate this to others before she herself
was arrested. )

But why was neither Palchinsky nor Khrennikov broken by
the Tibetan potion or hypnosis?

The fact is that an explanation on a higher, psychological
plane is called for.

One misunderstanding in particular results from the image of
these men as old revolutionaries who had not trembled in
Tsarist dungeons—seasoned, tried and true, hardened, etc.,
fighters. But there is a plain and simple mistake here. These de-
fendants were not those old revolutionaries. They had acquired
that glory by inheritance from and association with the Narod-
niks, the SR’s, and the Anarchists. They were the ones, the bomb
throwers and the conspirators, who had known hard-labor im-
prisonment and real prison terms—but even they had never in
their lives experienced a genuinely merciless interrogation (be-
cause such a thing did not exist at all in Tsarist Russia). And
these others, the Bolshevik defendants at the treason trials, had
never known either interrogation or real prison terms. The Bol-
sheviks had never been sentenced to special “dungeons,” any
Sakhalin, any special hard labor in Yakutsk. It is well known
that Dzerzhinsky had the hardest time of them all, that he had
spent all his life in prisons. But, according to our yardstick, he
had served just a normal “tenner,” just a simple “ten-ruble bill,”

410 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

like any ordinary collective farmer in our time. True, included
in that tenner were three years in the hard-labor central prison,
but that is nothing special either.

The Party leaders who were the dindas in the trials of
1936 to 1938 had, in their revolutionary pasts, known short, easy
imprisonment, short periods in exile, and had never even had a
whiff of hard labor. Bukharin had many petty arrests on his
record, but they amounted to nothing. Apparently, he was never
imprisoned anywhere for a whole year at a time, and he had
just a wee bit of exile on Onega.” Kamenev, despite long years
of propaganda work and travel to all the cities of Russia, spent
only two years in prison and one and a half years in exile. In
our time, even sixteen-year-old kids got five right off. Zinoviev,
believe it or not, never spent as much as three months in prison.
He never received even one sentence! In comparison with the
ordinary natives of our Archipelago they were all callow youths;
they didn’t know what prison was like. Rykov and I. N. Smirnov
had been arrested several times and had been imprisoned for five
years, but somehow they went through prison very easily, and
they either escaped from exile without any trouble at all or were
released because of an amnesty. Until they were arrested and -
imprisoned in the Lubyanka, they hadn’t the slightest idea what
a real prison was nor what the jaws of unjust interrogation were
like. (There is no basis for assuming that if Trotsky had fallen
into those jaws, he would have conducted himself with any less
self-abasement, or that his resistance would have proved stronger
than theirs. He had had no occasion to prove it. He, too, had
known only easy imprisonment, no serious interrogations, and
a mere two years of exile in Ust-Kut. The terror Trotsky inspired
as Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council was some-
thing he acquired very cheaply, and does not at all demonstrate
any true strength of character or courage. Those who have con-
demned many others to be shot often wilt at the prospect of their
own death. The two kinds of toughness are not connected.) And
as for Radek—he was a plain provocateur. (And he wasn’t the
only one in these three trials!) And Yagoda was an inveterate,
habitual criminal.

35. All the information here comes from Volume 41 of the Granat Encyclo-
pedia, in which either autobiographical or reliable biographical essays on the
leaders of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) are collected.

The Law Matures | 411

(This murderer of millions simply could not imagine that his
superior Murderer, up top, would not, at the last moment, stand
up for him and protect him. Just as though Stalin had been sitting
right there in the hall, Yagoda confidently and insistently begged
him directly for mercy: “I appeal to you! For you I built two
great canals!” And a witness reports that at just that moment
a match flared in the shadows behind a window on the second
floor of the hall, apparently behind a muslin curtain, and, while
it lasted, the outline of a pipe could be seen. Whoever has been
in Bakhchisarai may remember that Oriental trick. The second-
floor windows in the Hall of Sessions of the State Council are
covered with iron sheets pierced by small holes, and behind them
is an unlit gallery. It is never possible to guess down in the hall
itself whether someone is up there or not. The Khan remained
invisible, and the Council always met as if in his presence.
Given Stalin’s out-and-out Oriental character, I can readily be-
lieve that he watched the comedies in that October Hall. I cannot
imagine that he would have denied himself this spectacle, this
satisfaction. )

And, after all, our entire failure to understand derives from
our belief in the unusual nature of these people. We do not, after
all, where ordinary confessions signed by ordinary citizens are
concerned, find their reasons for denouncing themselves and
others so fulsomely baffling. We accept it as something we under-
stand: a human being is weak; a human being gives in. But we
consider Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Pyatakov, I. N. Smirnov
to be supermen to begin with—and, in essence, our failure to
understand is due to that fact alone.

True, the directors of this dramatic production seem to have
had a harder task in selecting the performers than they’d had in
the earlier trials of the engineers: in those trials they had forty
barrels to pick from, so to speak, whereas here the available
troupe was small. Everyone knew who the chief performers were,
and the audience wanted to see them in the roles and them only.

Yet there was a choice! The most farsighted and determined of
those who were doomed did not allow themselves to be arrested.
They committed suicide first (Skrypnik, Tomsky, Gamarnik).
It was the ones who wanted to live who allowed themselves to be
arrested. And one could certainly braid a rope from the ones
who wanted to live! But even among them some behaved differ-

412 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

ently during the interrogations, realized what was happening,
turned stubborn, and died silently but at least not shamefully.
For some reason, they did not, after all, put on public trial
Rudzutak, Postyshev, Yenukidze, Chubar, Kosior, and, for that
matter, Krylenko himself, even though their names would have
embellished the trials.

They put on trial the most compliant. A selection was made
after all.

The men selected were drawn from a lower order, but, on the
other hand, the mustached Producer knew each of them very
well. He also knew that on the whole they were weaklings, and
he knew, one by one, the particular weaknesses of each. Therein
lay his dark and special talent, his main psychological bent and
his life’s achievement: to see people’s weaknesses on the lowest
plane of being.

And the man who seems, in the perspective of time, to have
embodied the highest and brightest intelligence of all the dis-
graced and executed leaders (and to whom Arthur Koestler ap-
parently dedicated his talented inquiry) was N. I. Bukharin.
Stalin saw through him, too, at that lowest stratum at which the
human being unites with the earth; and Stalin held him in a long
death grip, playing with him as a cat plays with a mouse, letting
him go just a little, and then catching him again. Bukharin wrote
every last word of our entire existing—in other words, nonexist-
ent—Constitution, which is so beautiful to listen to. And he flew
about up there, just below the clouds, and thought that he had
outplayed Koba: that he had thrust a constitution on him that
would compel him to relax the dictatorship. And at that very
moment, he himself had already been caught in those jaws.

Bukharin did not like Kamenev and Zinoviev, and way back
when they had first been tried, after the murder of Kirov, he
had said to people close to him: “Well, so what? That’s the kind
of people they were; maybe there was something to it... .” (That
was the classic formula of the philistine in those years: “There
was probably something to it. . . . In our country they don’t
arrest people for nothing.” And that was said in 1935 by the lead-
ing theoretician of the Party!) He spent the period of the second
trial of Kamenev and Zinoviev, in the summer of 1936, hunting
in the Tien Shan, and knew nothing about it. He came down from

The Law Matures | 413

the mountains to Frunze—and there he read that the death sen-
tence had been imposed on both men, and read the newspaper
articles which made clear what annihilating testimony they had
given against him. But did he hasten to stop that act of repres-
sion? And did he protest to the Party that something monstrous
was being done? No, all he did was send Koba a telegram asking
him to postpone the execution of Kamenev and Zinoviev so
that he, Bukharin, could get there to confront them and prove
himself innocent.

It was too late! Koba had enough of the sworn testimony; why
did he need living confrontations?

However, they still didn’t arrest Bukharin for a long time. He
lost his job as editor-in-chief of Izvestiya and all his other Party
assignments and jobs, and he lived for half a year in his Kremlin
apartment—in the Poteshny Palace of Peter the Great—as if
in prison. (However, in the autumn he used to go to his dacha—
and the Kremlin guards would salute him as though nothing at
all had changed.) No one visited him or phoned him any longer.
And all during these months he wrote endless letters: “Dear
Koba! Dear Koba! Dear Koba!” And he got not one reply.

He was still trying to establish friendly contact with Stalin!

And Dear Koba, squinting, was already staging rehearsals.
For many long years Koba had been holding tryouts for various
roles, and he knew that Bukharchik would play his part beauti-
fully. He had, after all, already renounced those of his pupils and
supporters who had been arrested and exiled—they were few in
number in any case—and had allowed them to be destroyed.**
He had stood by and allowed his own line of thinking to be wiped
out and pilloried before it was fully developed and born. And
more recently, while he was still editor-in-chief of Izvestiya and
a member of the Politburo, he had accepted as legal the execution
of Kamenev and Zinoviev. Neither at the top of his lungs nor
even in a whisper had he expressed any indignation over that.
And yet these had all been tryouts for his own future role.

Way back in the past, when Stalin had threatened to expel him
(and all the rest of them) from the Party, Bukharin (like all the
rest) had renounced his views in order to remain in the Party.
And that, too, had been a tryout for his role. If that was how

36. The only one he defended was Yefim Tseitlin—but not for long.

414 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

they acted while still in freedom and still at the height of honor
and power, then they could certainly be depended on to follow
the script of the play faultlessly when their body, their food,
and their sleep were in the hands of the Lubyanka prompters.

And what did Bukharin fear most in those months before
his arrest? It is reliably known that above all he feared expulsion
from the Party! Being deprived of the Party! Being left alive but
outside the Party! And Dear Koba had played magnificently on
this trait of his (as he had with them all) from the very moment
he had himself become the Party. Bukharin (like all the rest
of them) did not have his own individual point of view. They
didn’t have their own genuine ideology of opposition, on the
strength of which they could step aside and on which they could
take their stand. Before they became an opposition, Stalin de-
clared them to be one, and by this move he rendered them power-
less. And all their efforts were directed toward staying in the
Party. And toward not harming the Party at the same time!

These added up to too many different obligations for them to
be independent.

In essence, Bukharin had been allotted the starring role, and
nothing was to be overlooked or abridged in the Producer’s work
with him, in the working of time on him, and in his own getting
used to the role. Even sending him to Europe the previous win-
ter to acquire manuscripts by Marx had been essential—not just
superficially, for the sake of the whole network of accusations
about his establishing contacts, but so that the aimless freedom
of life on tour might all the more insistently demand his return
to the main stage. And now, beneath black thunderclouds of
accusations, came the long, the interminable state of nonarrest, of
exhausting housebound lethargy, which ground down the will
power of the victim even more effectively than the direct pressure
of the Lubyanka. (Nor would the Lubyanka run away either—
it, too, would last for a year.)

On one occasion, Bukharin was summoned by Kaganovich,
who arranged a confrontation between him and Sokolnikov in
the presence of high-ranking Chekists. Sokolnikov gave testimony
about “the parallel Rightist Center” (parallel, in other words, to
that of the Trotskyites), and about Bukharin’s underground
activity. Kaganovich conducted the interrogation aggressively

The Law Matures | 415

and then ordered Sokolnikov to be taken away. And he said to
Bukharin in a friendly tone: “He lies in his teeth, the whore!”

Despite that, the newspapers continued to report the indigna-
tion of the masses. Bukharin telephoned the Central Committee.
Bukharin wrote letters beginning “Dear Koba,” in which he
begged that the accusations against him be publicly denied. And
then the prosecutor’s office published a roundabout declaration:
“Objective proofs for the indictment of Bukharin have not been
found.”

Radek telephoned him in the fall, wanting to see him. Bukharin
shunned him: We are both being accused; why add another
cloud? But their Izvestiya country houses were next to each other,
and Radek dropped in on him one evening: “No matter what I
may say later on, please know that I am not to blame for anything.
And anyway you will come out of it whole: you were not con-
nected with the Trotskyites.”

And Bukharin believed he would come out of it whole and
that he would not be expelled from the Party. For that would be
monstrous! In actuality, he had always been hostile to the
Trotskyites: they had put themselves outside the Party and look
what had come of it! They had to stick together. Even if they
made mistakes, they had to stick together on that too.

At the November demonstration (his farewell to Red Square),
he and his wife went to the reviewing stand for guests on his
newspaper editor’s press card. All at once an armed soldier came
up to him. His heart stopped! They were going to do it here? At
a time like this? No. The soldier saluted: “Comrade Stalin is sur-
prised at your being here. He asks you to take your place on the
mausoleum.”

And that’s the way they tossed him back and forth from hot
to cold for the entire half-year. On December 5 they adopted the
Bukharin constitution with fanfare and celebration and named
it the Stalinist Constitution for all eternity. At the December
Plenum of the Central Committee, they brought in Pyatakov,
with his teeth knocked out, and not a bit like himself. Behind
his back stood silent Chekists (Yagoda men, and Yagoda, after
all, was also being tested and prepared for a role). Pyatakov
delivered himself of the most repulsive sort of testimony against
Bukharin and Rykov, both of whom were sitting right there

416 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

among the leaders. Ordzhonikidze put his hand up to his ear
(he was hard of hearing): “See here, are you giving all this
testimony voluntarily?” (Note that down! Ordzhonikidze will get
a bullet of his own!) “Absolutely voluntarily’—and Pyatakov
swayed on his feet. And during the recess, Rykov said to Bu-
kharin: “Tomsky had will power. He understood it all back in
August, and he ended his own life. While you and I, like fools,
have gone on living.”

At this point Kaganovich made an angry, condemnatory speech
(he wanted so much to believe in Bukharchik’s innocence, but
he couldn’t any longer). And then Molotov. And then Stalin!
What a generous heart! What a memory for the good things!
“Nonetheless, I consider that Bukharin’s guilt has not yet been
proven. Perhaps Rykov is guilty, but not Bukharin.” (Someone
had drawn up charges against Bukharin against his will! )

From cold to hot. That’s how will power collapses. That’s how
to.grow used to the role of a ruined hero.

And then they began to bring to his home day after day the
records of interrogations: the depositions of young ex-students in
the Institute of Red Professors, of Radek, and all the rest of
them. And they all provided the gravest proofs of Bukharin’s
black treason. They took these documents to his home, not as
if he were a defendant—oh, by no means! Merely in his position
as a member of the Central Committee—merely for his informa-
tion.

Usually, when he received a new batch of these materials, Bu-
kharin would say to his twenty-two-year-old wife, who only that
spring had given him a son: “You read them. I can’t.” And he
would bury his head in his pillow. He had two revolvers at home.
(Stalin was giving him time too.) And yet he did not commit
suicide.

Is it not clear that he had grown used to his ordained role?

And one more public trial took place. And they shot one more
batch of defendants. And yet they continued to be merciful to
Bukharin. They had not taken Bukharin.

At the beginning of February, 1937, he decided to go on a
hunger strike at home, in order to force the Central Committee
to hold a hearing and clear him of the charges against him. He
announced it in a letter to “Dear Koba,” and he honestly went

The Law Matures | 417

through with it too. Then a Plenum of the Central Committee
was convened with the following agenda: (1) the crimes of the
Rightist Center; (2) the anti-Party conduct of Comrade Bu-
kharin, as evidenced by his hunger strike.

Bukharin hesitated. Had he perhaps really insulted the Party
in some particular way? Unshaven, thin, wan, already a prisoner
in appearance, he dragged himself along to the Plenum. “What on
earth were you thinking of?” Dear Koba asked him cordially. “But
what was I to do in the face of such accusations? They want to
expel me from the Party.” Stalin made a wry face at the absurdity:
“Come on, now. No one is going to expel you from the Party!”

Bukharin believed him and revived. He willingly assured the
Plenum of his repentance, and immediately abandoned his hunger
strike. (At home he said: “Come on now, cut me some sausage!
Koba said they wouldn’t expel me.”) But in the course of the
Plenum, Kaganovich and Molotov (impudent fellows they were,
indeed!—paid no attention to Stalin’s opinion!)*’ both called
Bukharin a Fascist hireling and demanded that he be shot.

And once again Bukharin’s spirits fell, and in his last days he
began to compose his “Letter to the Future Central Committee.”
Committed to memory and thereby preserved, it recently became
known to the whole world. However, it did not shake the world
to its foundations." For what were the last words this brilliant
theoretician decided to hand down to future generations? Just
one more cry of anguish and a plea to be restored to the Party.
(He paid dearly in shame for that devotion!) And one more
affirmation that he “fully approved” everything that had hap-
pened up to and including 1937. And that included not only all
the previous jeeringly mocking trials, but also all the foul-smelling
waves of our great prison sewage disposal system.

And that is how he himself certified that he, too, deserved to
plunge into those waves.

So, at long last, he had matured to the point of being turned
over to the prompters and the assistant producers—this muscular
man, this hunter and wrestler! (In playful tussles in the presence
of the Central Committee, how many times had he landed Stalin

37. See what a wealth of information we are deprived of because we’re
protecting Molotov’s noble old age.
38. Nor did it shake the “Future Central Committee” either.

418 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

flat on his back! And this, too, was probably something Koba
couldn’t forgive him.)

And in the case of one so fully prepared, so demolished, that no
torture was called for, how was his position any stronger than
that of Yakubovich in 1931? How could he not be susceptible to
the same two arguments? He was in fact much weaker, because
Yakubovich longed for death, and Bukharin dreaded it.

There remained an easy dialogue with Vyshinsky along set
lines:

“Is it true that every opposition to the Party is a struggle against
the Party?” “In general it is, factually it is.” “But a struggle against
the Party cannot help but grow into a war against the Party.”
“According to the logic of things—yes, it must.” “And that means
that in the end, given the existence of oppositionist beliefs, any
foul deeds whatever might be perpetrated against the Party [es-
pionage, murder, sellout of the Motherland]?” “But wait a minute, .
none were actually committed.” “But they could have been?”
“Well, theoretically speaking.” (Those are your theoreticians for
you!) “But for us the highest of all interests are those of the
Party?” “Yes, of course, of course!” “So you see, only a very fine
distinction separates us. We are required to concretize the eventu-
ality: in the interest of discrediting for the future any idea of
Opposition, we are required to accept as having taken place what
could only theoretically have taken place. After all, it could
have, couldn’t it?” “It could have.” “And so it is necessary to
recognize as actual what was possible; that’s all. It’s a small phi-
losophical transition. Are we in agreement? .. . Yes, and. one
thing more, and it’s not for me to explain to you, but if you re-
treat and say something different during the trial, you understand
that it will only play into the hands of the world bourgeoisie and
will only do the Party harm. Well, and it’s clear that in that case
you yourself will not die an easy death. But if everything goes
off all right, we will, of course, allow you to go on living. We’ll
send you in secret to the island of Monte Cristo, and you can
work on the economics of socialism there.” “But in previous trials,
as I understand it, you did shoot them all?” “But what comparison
is there between you and them! And then, we also left many of
them alive too. They were shot only in the newspapers.”

And so perhaps there isn’t any insoluble riddle?

The Law Matures | 419

It was all that same invincible theme song, persisting with only
minor variations through so many different trials: “After all, we
and you are Communists! How could you have gotten off the
track and come out against us? Repent! After all, you and we
together—is us!”

Historical comprehension ripens slowly in a society. And when
it does ripen, it is so simple. Neither in 1922, nor in 1924, nor
in 1937 were the defendants able to hang onto their own point
of view so firmly that they could raise their heads and shout, in
reply to that bewitching and anesthetizing melody:

“No, we are not revolutionaries with you! No, we are not Rus-
sians with you! No, we are not Communists with you!”

It would seem that if only that kind of shout had been raised,
all the stage sets would have collapsed, the plaster masks would
have fallen off, the Producer would have fled down the backstairs,
and the prompters would have sneaked off into their ratholes. And
out of doors it would have been, say, 1967!

But even the most superbly successful of these theatrical pro-
ductions was expensive and troublesome. And Stalin decided not
to use open trials any longer.

Or rather in 1937 he probably did have a plan for holding public
trials on a wide scale in the local districts—so the black soul of
the opposition would be made visible to the masses. But he
couldn’t find producers who were good enough. It wasn’t practical
to prepare things so carefully, and the mental processes of the
accused weren’t so complex, and Stalin only got into a mess,
although very few people know about it. The whole plan broke
down after a few trials, and was abandoned.

It’s appropriate here to describe one such trial—the Kady case,
detailed reports of which the Ivanovo provincial newspapers
published initially.

At the end of 1934, a new local administrative district was
created in the remote wilds of Ivanovo Province at the point
where it joined Kostroma and Nizhni Novgorod Provinces, and
its center was situated in the ancient, slow-moving village of Kady.
New leaders were sent there from various localities, and they

420 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

made one another’s acquaintance right in Kady. There they found
a remote, sad, impoverished region, badly in need of money,
machines, and intelligent economic management, but, instead,
starved by grain procurements. It happened that Fyodor Ivanovich
Smirnov, the First Secretary of the District Party Committee, was
a man with a strong sense of justice; Stavrov, the head of the
District Agricultural Department, was a peasant through and
through, one of those peasants known as the intensivniki—in
other words, the hard-working, zealous, and literate peasants who
in the twenties had run their farms on a scientific basis, for which
they were at that time rewarded by the Soviet government, since it
had not yet been decided that all these intensivniki must be de-
stroyed. Because Stavrov had entered the Party he had survived
the liquidation of the kulaks. (And maybe he even took part in
the liquidation of the kulaks?) These men tried to do something
for the peasants in their new district, but directives kept pouring
down from above and each one ran counter to some initiative of
theirs; it was as if, up there, they were busy thinking up what
they could do to make things worse and more desperate for the
peasants. And at one point the leaders in Kady wrote the province
leadership that it was necessary to lower the plan for procurement
of breadgrains because the district couldn’t fulfill the plan without
becoming impoverished well below the danger point. One has to
recall the situation in the thirties (and maybe not only the
thirties?) to realize what sacrilege against the plan and what
rebellion against the government this represented! But, in ac-
cordance with then current style, measures were not taken directly
from above, but were left to local initiative. When Smirnov was
on vacation, his deputy, Vasily Fyodorovich Romanov, the Sec-
ond Secretary, arranged to have a resolution passed by the District
Party Committee: “The successes of the district would have been
even more brilliant [?] if it were not for the Trotskyite Stavrov.”
This set in motion the “individual case” of Stavrov. (An interest-
ing approach: Divide and rule! For the time being, Smirnov was
merely to be frightened, neutralized, and compelled to retreat;
there would be time enough later on to get to him. And this, on a
small scale, was precisely the Stalinist tactic in the Central Com-
mittee.) At stormy Party meetings, however, it became clear that
Stavrov was about as much of a Trotskyite as he was a Jesuit. The

The Law Matures | 421

head of the District Consumer Cooperatives, Vasily Grigoryevich
Vlasov, a man with a ragtag, haphazard education but one of
those native talents others are so surprised to find among Russians,
a born retail trade executive, eloquent, adroit in an argument,
who could get fired to red heat about anything he believed to be
right, tried to persuade the Party meeting to expel Romanov from
the Party for slander. And they actually did give Romanov an
official Party rebuke! Romanov’s last words in this dispute were
typical of this kind of person, demonstrating his assurance in
regard to the general situation: “Even though they proved Stavrov
was not a Trotskyite, nonetheless I am sure he is a Trotskyite. The
Party will investigate, and it will also investigate the rebuke to
me.” And the Party did investigate: the District NK VD arrested
Stavrov almost immediately, and one month later they also
arrested Univer, the Chairman of the District Executive Com-
mittee and an Estonian. And Romanov took over Univer’s job as
Chairman of the District Executive Committee. Stavrov was
taken to the Provincial NKVD, where he confessed he was a
Trotskyite, that he had acted in coalition with the SR’s all his life,
that he was a member of an underground rightist organization in
his district (this is a bouquet worthy of the times, the only thing
missing being a connection with the Entente). Perhaps he never
really did confess these things, but no one is ever going to know,
since he died from torture during interrogation in the internal
prison of the Ivanovo NKVD. The pages of his deposition were
there in full. Soon afterward, they arrested Smirnov, the secretary
of the District Party Committee, as the head of the supposed
rightist organization; and Saburov, the head of the District Fi-
nancial Department, and someone else as well.

Of interest is the way in which Vlasov’s fate was decided. He
had only recently demanded the expulsion from the Party of
Romanov, now the new Chairman of the District Executive Com-
mittee. He had also fatally offended Rusov, the district prosecutor,
as we have already reported in Chapter 4, above. He had offended
N. I. Krylov, the Chairman of the District NK VD, by protecting
two of his energetic and resourceful executives from being ar-
rested for supposed wrecking—both of them had black marks on
their records because of their social origins. (Vlasov always hired
all kinds of “former” people for his work—because they mastered

422 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

the business effectively and, in addition, tried hard; people pro-
moted from the ranks of the proletariat knew nothing and, more
importantly, didn’t want to know anything.) Nonetheless the
NKVD was prepared to make its peace with the trade cooperative!
Sorokin, the Deputy Chairman of the District NKVD, came in
person to see Vlasov with a peace proposal: to give the NKVD
700 rubles’ worth of materials without charging them for it (and
later on we will somehow write it off). (The ragpickers! And that
was two months’ wages for Vlasov, who had never taken anything
illegally for himself.) “And if you don’t give it to us, you are going
to regret it.” Vlasov kicked him out: “How do you dare offer me,
a Communist, a deal like that?” The very next day Krylov paid a
call on the District Consumer Cooperative, this time as the rep-
resentative of the District Committee of the Party. (This mas-
querade, like all these tricks, was in the spirit of 1937.) And this
time he ordered the convening of a Party meeting; the agenda:
“On the wrecking activities of Smirnov and Univer in the Con-
sumers’ Cooperatives,” the report to be delivered by Comrade
Vlasov. Well, now, that’s a gem of a trick for you! No one at that
point was making charges against Vlasov. But it would be quite
enough for him to say two little words about the wrecking ac-
tivities of the former secretary of the District Party Committee
in his, Vlasov’s, field, and the NKVD would interrupt: “And
where were you? Why didn’t you come to us in time?” In a situa-
tion of this sort many others would have lost their heads and
allowed themselves to be trapped. But not Vlasov! He immedi-
ately replied: “I won’t make the report! Let Krylov make the
report—after all, he arrested Smirnov and Univer and is handling
their case.” Krylov refused: “Tm not familiar with the evidence.”
Vlasov replied: “If even you aren’t familiar with the evidence,
that means they were arrested without cause.” So the Party
meeting simply didn’t take place. But how often did people dare
to defend themselves? (We will not have a complete picture of
the atmosphere of 1937 if we lose sight of the fact that there were
still strong-willed people capable of difficult decisions, and if we
fail to recall that late that night T., the senior bookkeeper of the
District Consumer Cooperative, and his deputy N. came to
Vlasov’s office with 10,000 rubles: “Vasily Grigoryevich! Get out
of town tonight! Don’t wait for tomorrow. Otherwise you are

The Law Matures | 423

finished!” But Vlasov thought it did not befit a Communist to run
away.) The next morning there was a nasty article in the district
paper on the work of the District Consumer Cooperative. (One
has to point out that in 1937 the press always played hand in
glove with the NKVD.) By evening Vlasov had been asked to
give the District Party Committee an accounting of his own work.
(Every step of the way, this was how things were in the entire
Soviet Union. )

This was 1937, the second year of the so-called “Mikoyan
prosperity” in Moscow and other big cities. And even today, in
the reminiscences of journalists and writers, one gets the impres-
sion that at the time there was already plenty of everything. This
concept seems to have gone down in history, and there is a danger
of its staying there. And yet, in November, 1936, two years after
the abolition of bread rationing, a secret directive was published
in Ivanovo Province (and in other provinces) prohibiting the
sale of flour. In those years many housewives in small towns, and
particularly in villages, still used to bake their own bread. Pro-
hibiting the sale of flour meant: Do not eat bread! In the district
center of Kady, long bread lines formed such as had never before
been seen. (However, they attacked that problem, too, by for-
bidding the baking of black bread in district centers, permitting
only expensive white bread to be baked.) The only bakery in the
whole Kady District was the one in the district center, and people
began to pour into the center from the villages to get black bread.
The warehouses of the District Consumer Cooperative had flour,
but the two parallel prohibitions blocked off all avenues by which
it could be made available to the public! Vlasov, however, man-
aged to find a way out of the impasse, and despite the clever gov-
ernment rulings he kept the district fed for a whole year: he went
out to the collective farms and got eight of them to agree to set up
public bakeries in empty “kulak” huts (in other words, they
would simply bring in firewood and set the women to baking in
ordinary Russian peasant ovens, but, mind you, ovens which were
now socialized, publicly not privately owned). The District Con-
sumer Cooperative would undertake to supply them with flour.
There is eternal simplicity to a solution once it has been dis-
covered! Without building any bakeries (for which he had no
funds), Vlasov set them up in one day. Without carrying on a

424 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

trade in flour, he released flour from the warehouse continuously
and proceeded to order more from the provincial center. Without
selling black bread in the district center, he gave the district black
bread. Yes, he did not violate the letter of the instructions, but
he violated their spirit—for their essence was to compel a reduc-
tion in flour consumption by starving the people. And so, of
course, there were good grounds for criticizing him at the Dis-
trict Party Committee.

After that criticism he remained free overnight and was ar-
rested the next morning. He was a tough little bantam rooster.
He was short, and he always carried his head slightly thrown back,
with a touch of aggressiveness. He tried to avoid surrendering his
Party membership card, because no decision expelling him from
the Party had been reached at the District Party Committee the
night before. He also refused to give up his identification card as
a deputy of the district soviet, since he had been elected by the
people, and the District Executive Committee had not taken any
decision depriving him of his deputy’s immunity. But the police
did not appreciate such formalities and overpowered him, and
took them away by main force. They took him from the District
Consumer Cooperative down the main street of Kady in broad
daylight, and his young merchandise manager, a Komsomol mem-
ber, saw him from the window of the District Party Committee
headquarters. At that time not everyone, especially in the villages,
because of their naiveté, had learned to keep quiet about what
they thought. The merchandise manager shouted: “Look at those
bastards! Now they’ve taken away my boss too!” Right then and
there, without leaving the room, they expelled him from both the
District Party Committee and from the Komsomol, and he slid
down the well-known pathway into the bottomless pit.

Vlasov was arrested very late in comparison with the others
who were charged in the same case. The case had been nearly
completed without him, and it was in process of being set up as
an open trial. They took him to the Ivanovo NKVD Internal
Prison, but, since he was the last to be involved, he was not sub-
jected to any heavy pressure. He was interrogated twice. There
was no supporting testimony from witnesses. And the file of his
interrogation was filled with summary reports of the District Con-
sumer Cooperative and clips from the district newspaper. Vlasov

The Law Matures | 425

was charged with: (1) initiating bread lines; (2) having an in-
adequate minimum assortment of merchandise (just as though the
unavailable merchandise existed somewhere else and someone
had offered it to Kady); (3) procuring a surplus of salt (but this
was the obligatory “mobilization” reserve: ever since ancient
times people in Russia have been afraid of being without salt in
the event of war).

At the end of September, the defendants were brought to Kady
for public trial. It was not a short trip. (Remember how cheap
the OSO’s and the closed courts were!) From Ivanovo to Ki-
neshma they went in a Stolypin railway car; then seventy miles
from Kineshma to Kady in automobiles. There were more than
ten cars, an unusual file along an old, deserted road, and one
that aroused astonishment, fear, and the expectation of war in
the villages. Klyugin, the Chief of the Special Secret Department
of the Provincial NKVD for Counter-Revolutionary Organiza-
tions, was responsible for the faultless organization of the whole
trial and for terrifying the public with it. Their convoy consisted
of forty guards from the reserves of the mounted police, and
every day from September 24 to 27, with swords unsheathed and
Naguan revolvers at the ready, they took the prisoners from the
District NKVD to the still unfinished club building and back,
through the village where they had until recently been the gov-
ernment. Windows had already been installed in the club, but the
stage had not yet been finished. There was no electricity. There
was no electricity in Kady at all. After nightfall the court met
by the light of kerosene lamps. The spectators were brought in
from the collective farms in rotation. And all Kady crowded in
as well. Not only did they sit on window sills and benches, but
they stood packed in the aisles, seven hundred of them at a time.
(Russians have always loved spectacles.) The forward benches
were regularly reserved for Communists to provide the court with
dependable support.

A Special Assize of the provincial court had been constituted,
consisting of Deputy Chairman of the Provincial Court Shubin,
who presided, and members Biche and Zaozerov. The provincial
prosecutor Karasik, a graduate of Dorpat University, was in
charge of the prosecution. And even though all the accused de-
clined defense lawyers, a government lawyer was forced on them

426 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

so that the case wouldn’t be left without a prosecutor. The formal
indictment, solemn, menacing, and lengthy, came down in essence
to the charge that an underground Rightist Bukharinite group
had existed in Kady District, which had been formed in Ivanovo
(in other words, you could expect arrests in Ivanovo too), and
had as its purpose the overthrow by wrecking of the Soviet gov-
ernment in the village of Kady (and this was about the remotest
boondock in all Russia the rightists could have found for a
starting point! ).

The prosecutor petitioned the court to have Stavrov’s testi-
mony, given before his death in prison, read to the court and
accepted as evidence. In fact, the whole charge against the group
was based on Stavrov’s evidence. The court agreed to include the
testimony of the deceased, just as if he were alive. (With the
advantage, however, that none of the defendants could refute it.)

But darkest Kady did not appreciate these scholarly fine points.
It waited to see what came next. The testimony of Stavrov, who
had been killed under interrogation, was read to the court and
once again became part of the record. The questioning of the
defendants began—and immediately there was chaos. All of them
repudiated the testimony they had given during the interrogation.

It is not clear how, in such an event, things would have been
arranged in the October Hall of the House of the Unions in Mos-
cow—but here, at any rate, it was decided shamelessly to
continue. The judge rebuked the defendants: How could you have
given different testimony during the interrogation? Univer, very
weak, replied in a barely audible voice: “As a Communist I
cannot, in a public trial, describe the interrogation methods of
the NKVD.” (Now there was a model for the Bukharin trial!
Now that’s what keeps them together! More than anything else,
they are worried that people might think ill of the Party. Their
judges had long since stopped worrying about that. )

During the recess, Klyugin visited the cells of the defendants.
He said to Vlasov: “You’ve heard how Smirnov and Univer
played the whore, the bastards? You’ve got to admit your guilt
and tell the whole truth!” “The truth and nothing but the truth,”
willingly agreed Vlasov, who had not yet weakened. “The truth
and nothing but the truth that you are every bit as bad as the
German Fascists!” Klyugin flew into a rage: “Listen here, you

The Law Matures | 427

whore, you'll pay with your blood!”*® From that moment Vlasov
was pushed forward from a back seat among the defendants to
a leading role in the trial—as the ideological leader of the group.

The crowd jamming the aisles grew interested whenever the
court fearlessly broke into questions about bread lines—about
things that touched everyone present to the quick. (And, of
course, bread had been put on unrestricted sale just before
the trial, and there were no bread lines that day.) A question to the
accused Smirnov: “Did you know about the bread lines in the
district?” “Yes, of course. They stretched from the store itself
right up to the building of the District Party Committee.” “And
what did you do about them?” Notwithstanding the tortures he
had endured, Smirnov had preserved his resounding voice and
tranquil righteousness. This broad-shouldered man with a simple
face and light-brown hair answered slowly, and the whole hall
heard every word he said: “Since all appeals to organizations in
the provincial capital had failed, I instructed Vlasov to write a
report to Comrade Stalin.” “And why didn’t you write it?” (They
hadn’t yet known about it! They had certainly missed that one!)
“We did write it, and I sent it by courier directly to the Central
Committee, bypassing the provincial leaders. A copy was kept in
the District Committee files.”

The whole courtroom held its breath. The court itself was in a
commotion. They shouldn’t have continued questioning, but
nonetheless someone asked: “And what happened?”

And, indeed, that question was on the lips of everyone in the
courtroom: “What happened?”

Smirnov did not sob, did not groan over the death of his ideal
(and that’s what was missing in the Moscow trials!). He replied
loudly and calmly:

“Nothing. There was no answer.”

And his tired voice seemed to say: Well, that, in fact, was just
what I expected.

There was no answer. From the Father and Teacher there was
no answer! The public trial had already reached its zenith! It had
already shown the masses the black heart of the Cannibal! And

39. Your own blood, too, is going to flow soon, Klyugin! Caught in the
Yezhov gang of gaybisty, Klyugin will have his throat cut by the stool pigeon
Gubaidulin.

428 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

the trial could have been called off right then and there. But, oh
no, they didn’t have sense enough for that, or tact enough for
that, and they kept rubbing away at the befouled spot for three
more days.

The prosecutor raised a hue and cry: Double-dealing! That’s
what it was. They engaged in wrecking with one hand and with
the other they dared write Comrade Stalin. And they even ex-
pected a reply from him. Let the defendant Vlasov tell us how he
pulled off such a nightmarish piece of wrecking that he stopped
the sale of flour and the baking of rye bread in the. district
center.

Vlasov, the bantam rooster, didn’t have to be asked to rise—he
had already jumped up, and he shouted resoundingly through
the hall:

“I agree to give a full answer to the court, but on condition
that you, the prosecutor, Karasik, leave the accuser’s rostrum and
sit down here next to me!” It was incomprehensible. Noise, shout-
ing. Call them to order! What was going on?

Having gotten the floor with this maneuver, Vlasov explained
willingly.

“The prohibitions on selling flour and baking rye bread were
instituted by a decree of the Provincial Executive Committee. One
of the permanent members of its presidium is Provincial Prose-
cutor Karasik. If that’s wrecking, then why didn’t you veto it as
prosecutor? That means you were a wrecker even before I
was!”

The prosecutor choked. It was a swift, well-placed blow. The
court was also at a loss. The judge mumbled.

“If necessary [?] we will try the prosecutor too. But today we
are trying you.”

(Two truths: it all depends on your rank.)

“I demand that he be removed from the prosecutor’s rostrum,”
insisted the indefatigable, irrepressible Vlasov.

Recess.

Now, in terms of indoctrinating the masses, just what sig-
nificance could such a trial have?

But they kept on and on. After questioning the defendants they
began to question the witnesses. The bookkeeper N.

“What do you know about Vlasov’s wrecking activities?”

“Nothing.”

The Law Matures | 429

“How can that be?”

“I was in the witnesses’ room and I didn’t hear what was said
in here.”

“You don’t have to hear! Many documents passed through
your hands. You couldn’t help but know.”

“The documents were all in proper order.”

“But here is a stack of district newspapers, and even there they
were writing about Vlasov’s wrecking activities. And you claim
you don’t know anything?”

“Well, go ask the people who wrote the articles.”

Then there was the manager of the bread store.

“Tell me, does the Soviet government have much bread?”

(Well, now! Just how could you answer that? Who was going
to say: “I didn’t count it”?)

“A lot.”

“Why are there bread lines at your store?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who was in charge?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know? Who was in charge of
your store?”

“Vasily Grigoryevich.”

“What the devil! What do you mean calling him Vasily Gri-
goryevich? Defendant Vlasov! That means he was in charge.”

The witness fell silent.

The judge of the court dictated to the stenographer: “The
answer: ‘As a consequence of the wrecking activity of Vlasov,
bread lines resulted, notwithstanding the Soviet government's
enormous stocks of bread.’ ”

Repressing his own fears, the prosecutor delivered a long and
angry speech. The defense lawyer for the most part defended only
himself, emphasizing that the interests of the Motherland were
as dear to him as they were to any honest citizen.

In his final words to the court, Smirnov asked for nothing and
expressed no repentance for anything. Insofar as we can recon-
struct it now, he was a firm person and too forthright to have
lasted through 1937.

When Saburov begged that his life be spared—“not for me, but
for my little children”—Vlasov, out of vexation, pulled him back
by the jacket: “You're a fool.”

430 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

Vlasov himself did not fail to take advantage of his last chance
to talk back impudently.

“I consider you not a court but actors pretending to be a court
in a stage farce where roles have already been written for you.
You are engaged in a repulsive provocation on the part of the
NKVD. You are going to sentence me to be shot no matter what
I say. I believe one thing only: the time will come when you will
be here in my place.”*°

The court spent from 7 P.M. to 1 A.M. composing the verdict,
and all the while the kerosene lamps were burning in the hall,
and the defendants sat beneath drawn sabers, and there was a
hum of conversation among the spectators who had not left.

And just as it took them a long time to compose the verdict,
it took them a long time to read it, piling up on top of one an-
other all kinds of fantastic wrecking activities, contacts, and plans.
Smirnov, Univer, Saburov, and Vlasov were sentenced to be shot;
two others to ten years; one to eight years. In addition, the verdict
of the court led to the exposure of an additional wrecking organi-
zation in the Komsomol in Kady (whose members were, of course,
immediately arrested. Remember the young merchandise man-
ager?). And of a center of underground organizations in Ivanovo,
which was, of course, in its turn, subordinate to Moscow. (One
more nail in Bukharin’s coffin. )

After the solemn words “To be shot!” the judges paused for
applause. But the mood in the hall was so gloomy, with the sighs
and tears of people who had no connection with the defendants,
and the screams and swooning of their relatives, that no applause
was to be heard even from the first two benches, where the Party
members were sitting. This, indeed, was totally improper. “Oh,
good Lord, what have you done?” someone in the hall shouted at
the members of the court. Univer’s wife dissolved in tears. In the
half-darkness, the crowd began to stir. Vlasov shouted at the
front benches:

“Come on, you bastards, why aren’t you clapping? Some Com-
munists you are!”

The political commissar of the guards platoon ran up to him
and shoved his revolver in his face. Vlasov reached out to grab
the revolver, but a policeman ran up and pushed back his po-
litical commissar, who had been guilty of a blunder. The chief

40. Generally speaking, he was wrong just on this one point.

The Law Matures | 431

of the convoy gave the command: “Arms at the ready!” And
thirty police carbines and the pistols of the local NKVD men
were aimed at the defendants and at the crowd. (It seemed at the
time as though the crowd would rush forward to free the de-
fendants. )

The hall was lit only by a few kerosene lamps, and the semi-
darkness heightened the general confusion and fear. The crowd,
finally convinced, not so much by the trial as by the carbines now
leveled at it, pushed in a panic against the doors and windows.
The wood cracked and broke; glass tinkled. Univer’s wife, in a
dead faint, was almost trampled to death and was left lying be-
neath the chairs until morning.

And there never was any applause.**

And not only couldn’t the condemned prisoners be shot then
and there, but they had to be kept under even stricter guard,
because now they really had nothing at all to lose, and they had to
be taken to the provincial capital for execution.

They managed to cope with the first problem—sending them
off by night to the NKVD along the main street—by having each
condemned man guarded by five men. One of the guards carried
a lantern. One went ahead with a pistol at the ready. Two held the
condemned prisoner by the arms and kept their pistols in their
free hands. The fifth brought up the rear, with his pistol pointed
at the condemned man’s back.

The rest of the police were ranged in formation in order to
prevent any attack by the crowd.

Every reasonable man will now agree that the NKVD could
never have carried out its great assignment if they had fussed
about with open trials.

And that is why public political trials never really put down
roots in our country.

41. One little note on eight-year-old Zoya Vlasova. She loved her father
intensely. She could no longer go to school. (They teased her: “Your papa is
a wrecker!” She would get in a fight: “My papa is good!”) She lived only one
year after the trial. Up to then she had never been ill. During that year she
did not once smile; she went about with head hung low, and the old women
prophesied: “She keeps looking at the earth; she is going to die soon.” She
died of inflammation of the brain, and as she was dying she kept calling out:
“Where is my papa? Give me my papa!” When we count up the millions of
those who perished in the camps, we forget to multiply them by two, by three.

Chapter 11

The Supreme Measure

Capital punishment has had an up-and-down history in Russia.
In the Code of the Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich Romanov there
were fifty crimes for which capital punishment could be imposed.
By the time of the Military Statutes of Peter the Great there were
two hundred. Yet the Empress Elizabeth, while she did not repeal
those laws authorizing capital punishment, never once resorted
to it. They say that when she ascended the throne she swore an
oath never to execute anyone—and for all twenty years of her
reign she kept that oath. She fought the Seven Years’ War! Yet
she still got along without capital punishment. It was an astound-
ing record in the mid-eighteenth century—fifty years before the
guillotine of the Jacobins. True, we have taught ourselves to
ridicule all our past; we never acknowledge a good deed or a good
intention in our history. And one can very easily blacken Eliza-
beth’s reputation too; she replaced capital punishment with flog-
ging with the knout; tearing out nostrils; branding with the word
“thief”; and eternal exile in Siberia. But let us also say something
on behalf of the Empress: how could she have changed things
more radically than she did in contravention of the social concepts
of her time? And perhaps the prisoner condemned to death today
would voluntarily consent to that whole complex of punishments
if only the sun would continue to shine on him; but we, in our
humanitarianism, don’t offer him that chance. And perhaps the
reader will come to feel in the course of this book that twenty

432

The Supreme Measure | 433

or even ten years in our camps are harder to bear than were the
punishments of Elizabeth?

In today’s terms, Elizabeth had a universally human point of
view on all this, while the Empress Catherine the Great had, on
the contrary, a class point of view (which was consequently more
correct). Not to execute anyone at all seemed to her appalling and
indefensible. She found capital punishment entirely appropriate
to defending herself, her throne, and her system—in other words,
in political cases, such as those of Mirovich, the Moscow plague
mutiny, and Pugachev. But for habitual criminals, for nonpolitical
offenders, why not consider capital punishment abolished?

Under Paul, the abolition of capital punishment was confirmed.
(Despite his many wars, there were no military tribunals attached
to military units.) And during the whole long reign of Alex-
ander I, capital punishment was introduced only for war crimes
that took place during a campaign (1812). (Right at this point,
some people will say to us: What about deaths from running the
gantlet? Yes, indeed, there were, of course, hidden executions—
for that matter, one can literally drive a person to death with a
trade-union meeting!) But the yielding up of one’s God-given life
because others, sitting in judgment, have so voted simply did not
take place in our country even for crimes of state for an entire
half-century—from Pugachev to the Decembrists.

The blood of the five Decembrists whetted the appetite of our
state. From then on, execution for crimes of state was no longer
prohibited nor was it forgotten, right up to the February Revolu-
tion in 1917. It was confirmed by the Statutes of 1845 and 1904,
and further reinforced by the criminal statutes of the army and
navy.

And how many people were executed in Russia during that
period? We have already, in Chapter 8 above, cited the figures
given by liberal leaders of 1905—1907. Let us add to them the
verified figures of N. S. Tagantsev, the expert on Russian criminal
law. Up until 1905, the death penalty was an exceptional
measure in Russia. For a period of thirty years—from 1876 to
1904 (the period of the Narodnaya Volya revolutionaries and
the use of terrorism—a terrorism which did not consist merely

1. N. S. Tagantsev, Smertnaya Kazn (Capital Punishment), St. Petersburg,
1913. l

434 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

of intentions murmured in the kitchen of a communal apartment
—a period of mass strikes and peasant revolts; the period when
the parties of the future revolution were created and grew in
strength)—486 people were executed; in other words, about
seventeen people per year for the whole country. (This figure
includes executions of ordinary, nonpolitical criminals!)? During
the years of the first revolution (1905) and its suppression, the
number of executions rocketed upward, astounding Russian
imaginations, calling forth tears from Tolstoi and indignation
from Korolenko and many, many others: from 1905 through
1908 about 2,200 persons were executed—forty-five a month.
This, as Tagantsev said, was an epidemic of executions. It came
to an abrupt end.

When the Provisional Government came to power, it abolished
capital punishment entirely. In July, 1917, however, it was re-
instated in the active army and front-line areas for military
crimes, murder, rape, assault, and pillage (very widespread in
those areas at that time). This was one of the most unpopular
of the measures which destroyed the Provisional Government.
The Bolsheviks’ slogan before the Bolshevik coup d’état was:
“Down with capital punishment, reinstated by Kerensky!”

A story has come down to us that on the night of October
25-26 a discussion arose in Smolny as to whether one of the first
decrees shouldn’t be the abolition of capital punishment in
perpetuity—whereupon Lenin justly ridiculed the idealism of his
comrades. He, at any rate, knew that without capital punishment
there would be no movement whatever in the direction of the
new society. However, in forming a coalition government with
the Left SR’s, he gave in to their faulty concepts, and on October
28, 1917, capital punishment was abolished. Nothing good, of
course, could come from that “goody-goody” position. (Yes,
and how did they get rid of it? At the beginning of 1918, Trotsky
ordered that Aleksei Shchastny, a newly appointed admiral, be
brought to trial because he had refused to scuttle the Baltic
Fleet. Karklin, the Chairman of the Verkhtrib, quickly sentenced
him in broken Russian: “To be shot within twenty-four hours.”
There was a stir in the hall: But it has been abolished! Prosecutor

2. Thirteen people were executed in Schliisselburg from 1884 to 1906. An
awesome total—for Switzerland perhaps! |

The Supreme Measure | 435

Krylenko explained: “What are you worrying about? Executions
have been abolished. But Shchastny is not being executed; he is
being shot.” And they did shoot him.)

If we are to judge by official documents, capital punishment
was restored in all its force in June, 1918. No, it was not “re-
stored”; instead, a new era of executions was inaugurated. If
one takes the view that Latsis® is not deliberately understating
the real figures but simply lacks complete information, and that
the Revtribunals carried on approximately the same amount of
judicial work as the Cheka performed in an extrajudicial way,
one concludes that in the twenty central provinces of Russia in a
period of sixteen months (June, 1918, to October, 1919) more
than sixteen thousand persons were shot, which is to say more
than one thousand a month.* (This, incidentally, is when they
shot both Khrustalev-Nosar, the Chairman of the 1905 St. Peters-
burg Soviet—the first Russian soviet—and the artist who designed
the legendary uniform worn by the Red Army throughout the
Civil War.)

However, it may not even have been these individual execu-
tions, with or without formally pronounced death sentences,
which added up to thousands and inaugurated the new era of
executions in 1918 that stunned and froze Russia. Still more
terrible to us was the practice—initially followed by both warring
sides and, later, by the victors only—of sinking barges loaded
with uncounted, unregistered hundreds, unidentified even by a
roll call. (Naval officers in the Gulf of Finland, in the White,
Caspian, and Black seas, and, as late as 1920, hostages in Lake
Baikal.) This is outside the scope of our narrow history of courts
and trials, but it belongs to the history of morals, which is where
everything else originates as well. In all our centuries, from the
first Ryurik on, had there ever been a period of such cruelties
and so much killing as during the post-October Civil War?

We would omit from view one of the characteristic ups-and-
downs of the Russian capital-punishment story if we neglected
to mention that capital punishment was abolished in January,

3. Latsis, Dva Goda Borby na Vnutrennom Fronte, p. 75.

4. Now that we have started to make comparisons, here is another: during
the eighty years of the Inquisition’s peak effort (1420 to 1498), in all of Spain

ten thousand persons were condemned to be burned to death at the stake—in
other words, about ten a month.

436 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

1920. Yes, indeed! And some students of the subject might con-
ceivably be at a loss to interpret the credulity and helplessness
of a dictatorship that deprived itself of its avenging sword when
Denikin was still in the Kuban, Wrangel still in the Crimea, and
the Polish cavalry were saddling up for a campaign. But, in the
first place, this decree was quite sensible: it did not extend to the
decisions of military tribunals, but applied only to extrajudicial
actions of the Cheka and the decisions of tribunals in the rear.
In the second place, the way was prepared for it by first cleaning
out the prisons by the wholesale execution of prisoners who might
otherwise have come “under the decree.” And, in the third
place, it was in effect for a brief period—four months. (It lasted
only until the prisons had filled up again.) By a decree of May
28, 1920, capital punishment was restored to the Cheka.

The Revolution had hastened to rename everything, so that
everything would seem new. Thus the death penalty was re-
christened “the supreme measure”—no longer a “punishment”
but a means of social defense. From the groundwork of the
criminal legislation of 1924 it is clear that the supreme measure
was introduced only temporarily, pending its total abolition by
the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.

And in 1927 they actually did begin to abolish it. It was re-
tained solely for crimes against the state and the army—Arrticle
58 and military crimes—and, true, for banditry also. (But the
broad political interpretation of “banditry” was as well known
then as it is now: from a Central Asian “Basmach,” right up to
a Lithuanian forest guerrilla, every armed nationalist who doesn’t
agree with the central government is a “bandit,” and how could
one possibly get along without that article? Similarly, any par-
ticipant in a camp rebellion and any participant in an urban
rebellion is also a “bandit.”) But where articles protecting
private individuals were concerned, capital punishment was
abolished to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Revolu-
tion.

And for the fifteenth anniversary, the law of Seven-eighths was
added to the roster of capital punishment—that law so vitally
important to advancing socialism, which guaranteed the Soviet
subject a. bullet for each crumb stolen from the state’s table.

As always happens at the start, they hurried to apply this

The Supreme Measure | 437

law in 1932-1933 and shot people with special ferocity. In this
time of peace in December, 1932 (while Kirov was still alive), at
one time 265 condemned prisoners were awaiting execution in
Leningrad’s Kresty Prison alone.” And during the whole year,
it would certainly seem that more than a thousand were shot in
Kresty alone.

And what kind of evildoers were these condemned men?
Where did so many plotters and troublemakers come from?
Among them, for example, were six collective farmers from
nearby Tsarskoye Selo who were guilty of the following crime:
After they had finished mowing the collective farm with their
own hands, they had gone back and mowed a second time along
the hummocks to get a little hay for their own cows. The All-
Russian Central Executive Committee refused to pardon all six
of these peasants, and the sentence of execution was carried out.

What cruel and evil Saltychikha, what utterly repulsive and
infamous serf-owner would have killed six peasants for their
miserable little clippings of hay? If one had dared to beat them
with birch switches even once, we would know about it and
read about it in school and curse that name.® But now, heave
the corpses into the water, and pretty soon the surface is all
smooth again and no one’s the wiser. And one must cherish the
hope that someday documents will confirm the report of my
witness, who is still alive. Even if Stalin had killed no others, I
believe he deserved to be drawn and quartered just for the lives
of those six Tsarskoye Selo peasants! And yet they still dare
shriek at us (from Peking, from Tirana, from Tbilisi, yes, and.
plenty of big-bellies in the Moscow suburbs are doing it too):
“How could you dare expose him?” “How could you dare disturb
his great shade?” “Stalin belongs to the world Communist move-
ment!” But in my opinion all he belongs to is the Criminal Code.
“The peoples of all the world remember him as a friend.” But
not those on whose backs he rode, whom he slashed with his
knout.

5. Testimony of B., who brought food to the cells of the prisoners con-
demned to be shot.

6. What isn’t known in our schools is the fact that Saltychikha, by a verdict
of her own peers, was imprisoned for eleven years in the subterranean
crypt of the Ivanovsky Monastery in Moscow for the atrocities inflicted on

her serfs. (Prugavin, Monastyrskiye Tyurmy [Monastery Prisons], Posrednik
Publishers, p. 39.)

438 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

However, let us return to being dispassionate and impartial
once more. Of course, the All-Russian Central Executive Com-
mittee would certainly have “completely abolished” the supreme
measure, as promised, but unfortunately what happened was that
in 1936 the Father and Teacher “completely abolished” the
All-Russian Central Executive Committee itself. And the
Supreme Soviet that succeeded it had an eighteenth-century ring.
“The supreme measure” became a punishment once again, and
ceased to be some kind of incomprehensible “social defense.”
Even to the Stalinist ear the executions of 1937-1938 could

hardly fit into any framework of “defense.”

What legal expert, what criminal historian, will provide us
with verified statistics for those 1937—1938 executions? Where
is that Special Archive we might be able to penetrate in order to
read the figures? There is none. There is none and there never
will be any. Therefore we dare report only those figures mentioned
in rumors that were quite fresh in 1939-1940, when they were
drifting around under the Butyrki arches, having emanated from
the high- and middle-ranking Yezhov men of the NKVD who
had been arrested and had passed through those cells not long
before. (And they really knew!) The Yezhov men said that dur-
ing those two years of 1937 and 1938 a half-million “political
prisoners” had been shot throughout the Soviet Union, and 480,-
000 blatnye—habitual thieves—in addition. (The thieves were
all shot under Article 59-3 because they constituted “a basis of
Yagoda’s power”; and thereby the “ancient and noble companion-
ship of thieves” was pruned back.)

How improbable are these figures? Taking into consideration
that the mass executions went on not for two full years but only
for a year and a half, we would have to assume (under Article
58—in other words, the politicals alone) an average of 28,000
executions per month in that period. For the whole Soviet Union.
But at how many different locations were executions being
carried out? A figure of 150 would be very modest. (There were
more, of course. In Pskov alone, the NKVD set up torture and
execution chambers in the basements of many churches, in
former hermits’ cells. And even in 1953 tourists were still not
allowed into these churches, on the grounds that “archives”
were kept there. The cobwebs hadn’t been swept out for ten

The Supreme Measure | 439

years at a stretch: those were the “archives” they kept there. And
before beginning restoration work on these churches, they had to
haul away the bones in them by the truckload.) On the basis of
this calculation, an average of six people were shot in the course
of one day at each execution site. What’s so fantastic about that?
It is even an understatement! (According to other sources,
1,700,000 had been shot by January 1, 1939.)

During the years of World War II, the use of capital punish-
ment was occasionally extended for various reasons (as, for
example, by the militarization of the railroads), and, at times,
was broadened as to method (from April, 1943, on, for example,
with the decree on hanging).

All these events delayed to a certain extent the promised full,
final, and perpetual repeal of the death penalty. However, the
patience and loyalty of our people finally earned them this re-
ward. In May, 1947, Iosif Vissarionovich inspected his new
starched dickey in his mirror, liked it, and dictated to the Presi-
dium of the Supreme Soviet the Decree on the Abolition of
Capital Punishment in peacetime (replacing it with a new
maximum term of twenty-five years—it was a good pretext for
introducing the so-called quarter).

But our people are ungrateful, criminal, and incapable of ap-
preciating generosity. Therefore, after the rulers had creaked
along and eked out two and a half years without the death
penalty, on January 12, 1950, a new decree was published that
constituted an about-face: “In view of petitions pouring in from
the national republics [the Ukraine?], from the trade unions [oh,
those lovely trade unions; they always know what’s needed],
from peasant organizations [this was dictated by a sleepwalker:
the Gracious Sovereign had stomped to death all peasant organi-
zations way back in the Year of the Great Turning Point], and
also from cultural leaders [now, that is quite likely],” capital
punishment was restored for a conglomeration of “traitors of the
Motherland, spies, and subversives-diversionists.” (And, of
course, they forgot to repeal the quarter, the twenty-five-year
sentence, which remained in force.)

And once this return to our familiar friend, to our beheading
blade, had begun, things went further with no effort at all: in
1954, for premeditated murder; in May, 1961, for theft of state

440 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

property, and counterfeiting, and terrorism in places of imprison-
ment (this was directed especially at prisoners who killed in-
formers and terrorized the camp administration); in July, 1961,
for violating the rules governing foreign currency transactions;
in February, 1962, for threatening the lives of (shaking a fist at)
policemen or Communist vigilantes, the so-called “druzhinniki”;
then for rape; and immediately thereafter for bribery.

But all of this is simply temporary—until complete abolition.
And that’s how it’s described today too.’

And so it turns out that Russia managed longest of all without
capital punishment in the reign of the Empress Elizabeth
Petrovna.

In our happy, blind existence, we picture condemned men as a
few ill-fated, solitary individuals. We instinctively believe that
we could never end up on death row, that it would take an out-
standing career if not heinous guilt for that to happen. A great
deal has still to be shaken up inside our heads for us to get the
real picture: a mass of the most ordinary, average, gray people
have languished in death cells for the most ordinary, everyday
misdemeanors, and, although some were lucky and had their
death sentences commuted, which was purely a matter of chance,
they very often got the super (which is what the prisoners called
“the supreme measure,” since they hate lofty words and manage
somehow to give everything a nickname that is both crude and
short).

The agronomist of a District Agricultural Department got a
death sentence for his mistaken analysis of collective farm grain!
(Maybe it was because his analysis wasn’t what his chiefs wanted
from him?) That was in 1937.

Melnikov, the chairman of a handicraft artel that made
spools for thread, was sentenced to death because a spark from
a steam engine in his artel had caused a fire! That was in 1937.
(True, his death sentence was commuted to a “tenner.” )

7. “Osnovy Ugolovnogo Zakonodatelstva SSSR” (“Fundamental Principles
of Criminal Legislation of the U.S.S.R.”), Article 22, in Vedomosti Ver-

khovnogo Soveta SSSR (Bulletin of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R.),
1959, No. 1.

The Supreme Measure | 441

In that same Kresty Prison in Leningrad, in 1932, two of
the men in death cells were Feldman, convicted of possessing
foreign currency, and Faitelevich, a student at the conservatory,
for having sold steel ribbon for pen points. Primordial commerce,
the bread and butter and pastime of the Jew, had also become
worthy of the death penalty.

Ought we to be surprised then that the Ivanovo Province
village lad Geraska got the death penalty? In honor of the spring
St. Nicholas holiday, he went off to the next village to celebrate;
he drank heavily and, with a stick, he hit the rear end—no, not of
the policeman himself, but of the policeman’s horse. (True, in a
rage at the police he ripped a piece of board off the village soviet
building and then yanked out the village soviet telephone by the
cord, shouting: “Smash the devils!”)

Whether our destiny holds a death cell in store for us is not
determined by what we have done or not done. It is determined
by the turn of a great wheel and the thrust of powerful external
circumstances. For example, Leningrad was under siege and
blockade. And what would its highest-ranking leader, Comrade
Zhdanov, think if there were no executions among the cases in
Leningrad State Security during such difficult times? He would
think the Organs were lying down on the job, would he not?
Were there not big underground plots, directed from outside by
the Germans, to be discovered? Why were such plots discovered
under Stalin in 1919 and not under Zhdanov in 1942? No
sooner ordered than done. Several ramified plots were discovered.
You were asleep in your unheated Leningrad room, and the sharp
claws of the black hand were already hovering over you. And
yet none of this depended on you. Notice was taken of a
Lieutenant General Ignatovsky, whose windows looked out on
the Neva; he had pulled out a white handkerchief to blow his
nose. Aha, a signal! Furthermore, because Ignatovsky was an
engineer, he liked to talk about machinery with the sailors. And
that clinched it! Ignatovsky was arrested. The time for reckoning
came. Come on now, name forty members of your organization.
He named them. And so, if you happened to be an usher at the
Aleksandrinsky Theatre, your chances of being named as one
of his particular forty were minimal. But if you were a professor
at the Technological Institute, there you were on that list (once

442 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

more, that accursed intelligentsia). So how could it depend on
you? To be on such a list amounted to execution for each one.

And so they shot all of them. But here is how Konstantin
Ivanovich Strakhovich, a very important Russian scientist in
hydrodynamics, remained alive: Some even higher bigwigs in
State Security were dissatisfied because the list was too small and
not enough people were being shot. Therefore Strakhovich was
selected as a suitable center for uncovering a new organization.
He was summoned by Captain Altshuller: “What’s this all about?
Did you rush to confess everything so that you’d get shot and
thereby conceal the underground government? What was your
role in it?” Thus Strakhovich found himself in a new round of
interrogations while he remained on death row. He proposed
that they consider him the underground Minister of Education.
(He wanted to get it over with as soon as possible!) But that
wasn’t good enough for Altshuller. The interrogation continued,
and by this time Ignatovsky’s group was being executed. During
one of the interrogation sessions Strakhovich got angry. It wasn’t
that he wanted to live but that he was tired of dying, and, more
than anything else, the lies made him sick. And so while he was
being cross-questioned in the presence of some Security police
bigwig, he pounded on the table: “You are the ones who ought
to be shot. I am not going to lie any longer. I take back all my
testimony.” And his outburst helped! Not only did they stop
interrogating him, but they forgot about him in his death cell for
a long time.

In all probability an outburst of desperation in the midst of
general submissiveness will always help.

Thus many were shot—thousands at first, then hundreds of
thousands. We divide, we multiply, we sigh, we curse. But still
and all, these are just numbers. They overwhelm the mind and
then are easily forgotten. And if someday the relatives of those
who had been shot were to send one publisher photographs of
their executed kin, and an album of those photographs were to
be published in several volumes, then just by leafing through
them and looking into the extinguished eyes we would learn
much that would be valuable for the rest of our lives. Such read-
ing, almost without words, would leave a deep mark on our
hearts for all eternity.

The Supreme Measure | 443

In one household I am familiar with, where some former zeks
live, the following ceremony takes place: On March 5, the day
of the death of the Head Murderer, they spread out on the table
all the photographs of those who were shot and those who died
in camps that they have been able to collect—several dozen of
them. And throughout the day solemnity reigns in the apartment
—somewhat like that of a church, somewhat like that of a
museum. There is funeral music. Friends come to visit, to look at
the photographs, to keep silent, to listen, to talk softly together.
And then they leave without saying good-bye.

And that is how it ought to be everywhere. At least these
deaths would have left a small scar on our hearts.

So that they should not have died in vain!

And J, too, have a few such chance photographs. Look at
these at least:

Viktor Petrovich Pokrovsky—shot in Moscow in 1918.

Aleksandr Shtrobinder, a student—shot in Petrograd in
1918.

Vasily Ivanovich Anichkov—shot in the Lubyanka in 1927.

Aleksandr Andreyevich Svechin, a professor of the General
Staffi—shot in 1935.

Mikhail Aleksandrovich Reformatsky, an agronomist—shot
in Orel in 1938.
Yelizaveta Yevgenyevna Anichkova—shot in a camp on

the Yenisei in 1942.

How does all that happen? What is it like for people to wait
there? What do they feel? What do they think about? And what
decisions do they come to? And what is it like when they are
taken away? And what do they feel in their last moments? And
how, actually, do they... well...dothey...?

The morbid desire to pierce that curtain is natural. (Even
though it is, of course, never going to happen to any of us.)
And it is natural that those who have survived cannot tell us
about the very end—because, after all, they were pardoned.

What happens next is something the executioners know about.
But the executioners are not about to talk. (Take, for instance,
that famous Uncle Lyosha in the Kresty Prison in Leningrad, who
twisted the prisoner’s hands behind his back and put handcuffs

444 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

on him, and then, if the prisoner shouted down the nighttime
corridor, “Farewell, brothers!” crammed a rolled-up rag into
his mouth—just why should he tell you about it? He is probably
still walking around Leningrad, well dressed. But if you happen
to run into him in a beer parlor on the islands or at a soccer
game, ask him!)

However, even the executioner doesn’t know about everything
right to the very end. While a motor roars its accompaniment,
he fires his pistol bullets, unheard, into the back of a head, and
he is himself stupidly condemned not to understand what he has
done. He doesn’t know about the very end! Only those who have
been killed know it all to the very end—and that means no one.

It’s true, however, that the artist, however obliquely and un-
clearly, nevertheless knows some part of what happens right up
to the actual bullet, the actual noose.

So we are going to construct—from artists and from those
who were pardoned—an approximate picture of the death cell.
We know, for example, that they do not sleep at night but lie
there waiting. That they calm down again only in the morning.

Narokov (Marchenko) in his novel, Imaginary Values,’ a
work much spoiled by the author’s self-assigned task of describ-
ing everything as though he were Dostoyevsky, of tearing at the
reader’s heartstrings and trying to move him even more than
Dostoyevsky, nevertheless in my opinion described the death
cell and the scene of the execution itself very well. One cannot
verify it, of course, but somehow one believes it.

The interpretations of earlier artists, for example, Leonid
Andreyev, seem today somehow to belong willy-nilly to Krylov’s
time, a century and a half ago. And for that matter, what
fantasist could have imagined the death cells of 1937? Of neces-
sity, he would have woven his psychological threads: what it was
like to wait, how the condemned man kept listening, and the like.
But who could have foreseen and described such unexpected
sensations on the part of prisoners condemned to death as:

1. Prisoners awaiting execution suffered from the cold. They
had to sleep on the cement floor under the windows, where it
was 28 degrees Fahrenheit. (Strakhovich.) You could freeze to
death while you were waiting to be shot.

8. N. Narokov, Mnimyye Velichiny, Roman v 2-kh Chastyakh (Imaginary
Values; a Novel in Two Parts), New York, Chekhov Publishing House, 1952.

The Supreme Measure | 445

2. They suffered from being in stuffy, overcrowded cells.
Into a cell intended for solitary confinement they would shove
seven (never fewer), sometimes ten, fifteen, even twenty-eight
prisoners awaiting execution. (Strakhovich in Leningrad, 1942.)
And they remained packed in this way for weeks or even months!
What kind of nightmare was your seven to be hanged? People
in these circumstances don’t think about execution, and it’s not
being shot they worry about, but how to move their legs, how to
turn over, how to get a gulp of air.

In 1937, when up to forty thousand prisoners were being
held at one time in the prisons of Ivanovo—the internal prison of
the NKVD, No. 1, No. 2, and the cells for preliminary detention
—although they were just barely designed to hold three to four
thousand, Prison No. 2 held a mixture of prisoners under inter-
rogation, prisoners condemned to camp, prisoners sentenced to
be executed, prisoners whose death sentences had been com-
muted, and ordinary thieves—and all of them stood for several
days so jammed in against each other in one big cell that it was
impossible either to raise or lower an arm and those who were
shoved up against the bunks could easily break their legs on the
edges. It was winter, but in order not to be suffocated the
prisoners broke the glass in the windows. (It was in this cell that
the old Bolshevik Alalykin, with his snow-white head of hair—he
had joined the Party in 1898 and had quit the Party in 1917
after the April Theses—waited for his death sentence to be
carried out.)

3. Prisoners sentenced to death also suffered from hunger.
They waited such a long time after the death sentence had been
imposed that their principal sensation was no longer the fear
of being shot but the pangs of hunger: where could they get
something to eat? In 1941 Aleksandr Babich spent seventy-five
days in a death cell in the Krasnoyarsk Prison. He had already
reconciled himself to death and awaited execution as the only
possible end to his unsuccessful life. But he began to swell up
from starvation. At that point, they commuted his death sentence
to ten years, and that was when he began his camp career. And
what was the record stay in a death cell? Who knows? Vsevolod
Petrovich Golitsyn, the elder of a death cell, so to speak, spent
140. days in it in 1938. But was that a record? The glory of
Russian science, famed geneticist N. I. Vavilov, waited several

446 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

months for his execution—yes, maybe even a whole year. As a
prisoner still under death sentence he was evacuated to the
Saratov Prison, where he was kept in a basement cell that had
no window. When his death sentence was commuted in the sum-
mer of 1942, he was transferred to a general cell, and he could
not even walk. Other prisoners carried him to the daily outdoor
walk, supporting him under the arms.

4. Prisoners sentenced to death were given no medical at-
tention. Okhrimenko was kept in a death cell for a long time
in 1938, and he became very ill. Not only did they refuse to put
him in the hospital, but the doctor took forever to come to see
him. When she finally did come, she didn’t go into the cell;
instead, without examining him or even asking him any questions,
she handed him some powders through the bars. And fluid began
to accumulate in Strakhovich’s legs—dropsy. He told the jailer
about it—and they sent him, believe it or not, a dentist.

And when a doctor did enter the picture, was it right for him
to cure the prisoner under sentence of death—in other words,
to prolong his expectation of death? Or did humanitarianism
dictate that the doctor should insist on execution as quickly
as possible? Here is another little scene from Strakhovich: The
doctor entered and, talking with the duty jailer, he pointed a
finger at the prisoners awaiting execution: “He’s a dead man!
He’s a dead man! He’s a dead man!” (He was pointing out to
the jailer the victims of malnutrition and insisting that it was
wrong to torment people so, that it was time to shoot them.)

What, in fact, was the reason for holding them so long?
Weren’t there enough executioners? One must point out that the
prison authorities often suggested to and even asked many of the
condemned prisoners to sign appeals for commutation; and when
prisoners objected strongly and refused, not wanting any more
“deals,” they signed appeals in the prisoners’ names. And at the
very least it took months for the papers to move through the
twists and turns of the machine.

A clash between two different institutions was probably in-
volved. The interrogatory and judicial apparatus—as we learned
from the members of the Military Collegium, they were one and
the same—anxious to expose nightmarish and appalling cases,

The Supreme Measure | 447

could not impose anything less than a deserved penalty on the
criminals—death. But as soon as the sentences had been pro-
nounced and entered into the official record of interrogation
and trial, the scarecrows now called condemned men no longer
interested them. And, in actual fact, there hadn’t been any sedi-
tion involved, nor would the life of the state be affected in any
way if these condemned men remained alive. So they were left
entirely to the prison administration. And that administration,
which was closely associated with Gulag, looked at prisoners
from the economic point of view. To them the important figures
were not an increase in the number of executions but an increase
in the manpower sent out to the Archipelago.

And that is exactly the light in which Sokolov, the chief of
the internal prison of the Big House in Leningrad, viewed
Strakhovich, who finally became bored in the death cell and
asked for paper and pencil for his scientific work. In a notebook
he first composed “On the Interaction of a Liquid and a Solid
Moving in It,” and then “Calculations for Ballistas, Springs and
Shock Absorbers,” and then “Bases of the Theory of Stability.”
They had already allotted him an individual “scientific” cell and
fed him better, and questions began to come to him from the
Leningrad Front. He worked out for them “Volumetric Weapons’
Fire Against Aircraft.” And it all ended with Zhdanov’s com-
muting his death sentence to fifteen years. (The mail from the
mainland was slow, but soon his regular commutation order
came from Moscow, and it was more generous than Zhdanov’s:
merely a tenner.)°

And N.P., a mathematician with the rank of assistant pro-
fessor, was exploited by the interrogator Kruzhkov (yes, yes,
that same thief) for his personal ends. Kruzhkov was taking
correspondence courses. And so he summoned P. from the death
cell and gave him problems to solve in the theory of functions of
a complex variable for Kruzhkov’s assignments (and probably
they weren’t even his either).

So what did world literature understand about pre-execution
- suffering?

9. Strakhovich has all his prison notebooks even now. And his “scientific
career” outside the bars only began with them. He was destined later on to
head up one of the first projects in the U.S.S.R. for a turbojet engine.

448 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

Finally, we learn from a story of Ch v that a death cell
can be used as an element in interrogation, as a method of
coercing a prisoner. Two prisoners in Krasnoyarsk who had
refused to confess were suddenly summoned to a “trial,” “sen-
tenced” to the death penalty, and taken to the death cell.
(Ch v said: “They were subjected to a staged trial.” But in
a context in which every trial is staged, what word can we use to
distinguish this sort of pseudo trial from the rest? A stage on
a stage, or a play within a play, perhaps?) They let them get a
good swallow of that deathlike life. And then they put in stoolies
who were allegedly sentenced to die also and who suddenly be-
gan to repent having been so stubborn during interrogation and
begged the jailer to tell the interrogator that they were now ready
to sign everything. They were given their confessions to sign and
then taken out of the cell during the day—in other words, not to
be shot.

And what about the genuine prisoners in that cell who had
served as the raw material for the interrogators’ game? They no
doubt experienced reactions of their own when people in there
“repented” and were pardoned? Well, of course, but those are
the producer’s costs, so to speak.

They say that Konstantin Rokossovsky, the future marshal,
was twice taken into the forest at night for a supposed execution.
The firing squad leveled its rifles at him, and then they dropped
them, and he was taken back to prison. And this was also mak-
ing use of “the supreme measure” as an interrogator’s trick. But
it was all right; nothing happened; and he is alive and healthy
and doesn’t even cherish a grudge about it.

And almost always a person obediently allows himself to be
killed. Why is it that the death penalty has such a hypnotic
effect? Those pardoned recall hardly anyone in their cell who
offered any resistance. But there were such cases. In the Lenin-
grad Kresty Prison in 1932, the prisoners sentenced to execution
took the jailers’ revolvers away and opened fire. Following this,
a different approach was adopted: After peering through the
peephole to locate the person they wanted to take, they swarmed
into the cell—five armed jailers at a time—and rushed to grab
their man. There were eight prisoners under sentence of death

The Supreme Measure | 449

in the cell, but every one of them, after all, had sent a petition to
Kalinin and every one expected a commutation, and therefore:
“You today, me tomorrow.” They moved away and looked on
indifferently while the condemned man was tied up, while he
cried out for help, while they shoved a child’s rubber ball into
his mouth. (Now, looking at that child’s ball, could one really
guess all its possible uses? What a good example for a lecturer
on the dialectical method!)

Does hope lend strength or does it weaken a man? If the con-
demned men in every cell had ganged up on the executioners
as they came in and choked them, wouldn’t this have ended the
executions sooner than appeals to the All-Russian Central
Executive Committee? When one is already on the edge of the
grave, why not resist?

But wasn’t everything foredoomed anyway, from the moment
of arrest? Yet all the arrested crawled along the path of hope
on their knees, as if their legs had been amputated.

Vasily Grigoryevich Vlasov remembers that night after he’d
been sentenced when he was being taken through dark Kady,
and four pistols were brandished on four sides of him. His main
thought was: “What if they shoot right now, as a provocation,
claiming I was trying to escape?” Obviously he didn’t yet believe
in his sentence. He still hoped to live.

They confined him in the police room. He was allowed to lie
down on the desk to sleep, and two or three policemen kept
continuous guard by the light of a kerosene lamp. They talked
among themselves: “I kept listening and listening for four days,
and I never could understand what they were being condemned
for.” “It’s not for us to understand.”

Vlasov lived in this room for five days: they were waiting for
an official confirmation of the verdict in order to execute them
right there in Kady; it was not easy to convoy the condemned
men to some other point. Someone sent a telegram for Vlasov
requesting pardon: “I do not admit my guilt, and I request that
my life be spared.” There was no reply. During these days
Vlasov’s hands shook so that he could not lift his spoon to his

450 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

mouth and, instead, picked up his bowl and drank directly from
it. Klyugin visited him to jeer. (Soon after the Kady case,
he was transferred from Ivanovo to Moscow. That year saw
swift ascendancies and swift declines among those crimson stars
of the Gulag heaven. The time was approaching when they, too,
would be hurled into that same pit, but they didn’t know it.)

Neither confirmation nor commutation of the sentence arrived,
so they had to take the four condemned men to Kineshma. They
took them in four one-and-a-half-ton trucks, with one condemned
man guarded by seven policemen in each truck.

In Kineshma they were put in the crypt of a monastery.
(Monastery architecture, liberated from monkish ideology, was
very useful for us.) At this point some other condemned
prisoners were added to their group, and they were all taken in
a prisoners’ railroad car to Ivanovo.

In the freight yard in Ivanovo they separated three from the
rest—Saburov, Vlasov, and one of the men from the other group
—and immediately took the others away—to be shot—-so as not
to crowd the prison any further. And thus it was that Vlasov
said farewell to Smirnov.

The three others were put in the courtyard of Prison No. 1 in
the dank and raw October air and held there for four hours
while they led out, led in, and searched other groups of prisoners
in transit. There still was no actual proof that they wouldn’t be
shot that very day. During those four hours, they had to sit there
on the ground and think about it. At one point Saburov thought
they were being taken to be shot, but they were actually taken
to a cell instead. He did not cry out, but he gripped his neighbor’s
arm so hard that the latter yelled with pain. The guards had to
‘drag Saburov and prod him with their bayonets.

There were four death cells in this prison—in the same cor-
ridor as the juvenile cells and the hospital cells! The death cells
had two doors: the customary wooden door with a peephole and
a door made of iron grating; each door had two locks, and the
jailer and the block supervisor each had a key to a different one,
so the doors could be opened only by the two together. Cell 43
was on the other side of a wall of the interrogator’s office, and at
night, while the condemned men were waiting to be executed,
their ears were tormented by the screams of prisoners being
tortured.

The Supreme Measure | 451

Vlasov was put into Cell 61. This was a cell intended for
solitary confinement, sixteen feet long and a little more than three
feet wide. Two iron cots were anchored to the floor by thick
iron bolts, and on each cot two condemned men were lying, their
heads at opposite ends. Fourteen other prisoners were lying
crosswise on the cement floor.

Though it has long been well known that even a corpse has a
right to three arshins of earth (and even that seemed too little
to Chekhov), in this cell each of the condemned had been
allotted, while waiting for death, a little less than a third of that!

Vlasov asked whether executions were carried out immedi-
ately. “See for yourself. We’ve been here for ages and we're still
alive.”

The time of waiting began—of the well-known kind: the
prisoners didn’t sleep all night long; in a state of total depression,
they waited to be led out to death; they listened for every rustling
in the corridor. (And the worst thing was that endless waiting
destroys the will to resist.) Particularly nerve-racking were the
nights following a day on which someone received a commutation
of sentence. He went off with cries of happiness, and fear thick-
ened in the cell. After all, rejections as well as commutation had
rolled down from the high mountain that day. And at night they
would come for someone.

Sometimes the locks rattled at night and hearts fell: Is it for
me? Not me! ! And the turnkey would open the wooden door for
some nonsense or other: “Take your things off the window sill.”
That unlocking of the door probably took a year off the lives
of all nineteen inmates; maybe if that door was unlocked a
mere fifty times, they wouldn’t have to waste bullets! But how
grateful to him everyone was because everything was all right:
“We'll take them off right away, citizen chief!”

After the morning visit to the toilet, they went to sleep,
liberated from their fears. Then the jailer brought in the pail
of gruel and said: “Good morning!” According to prison rules,
the inner, iron door was supposed to be opened only in the
presence of the duty officer for the prison. But, as is well known,
human beings are better and lazier than their rules and instruc-
tions, and in the morning the jailer came in without the duty
officer and greeted them quite humanly—no, it was even more
precious than that: “Good morning!”

452 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

To whom else on all the earth was that morning as good as
it was to them! Grateful for the warmth of that voice and the
warmth of that dishwater, they drifted off to sleep until noon.
(They ate only in the morning!) Many were unable to eat when
they woke during the day. Someone had received a parcel. Rela-
tives might or might not know about the death sentence. Once
in the cell, these parcels became common property, but they lay
and rotted there in the stagnant damp.

By day there was still a little life and activity in the cell.
The block supervisor might come around—either gloomy
Tarakanov or friendly Makarov—and offer paper on which to
write petitions, and ask whether any of them who had some
money wanted to buy smokes from the commissary. Their ques-
tions seemed either too outrageous or extraordinarily human:
the pretense was being made that they weren’t condemned men
at all, was that it?

The condemned men broke off the bottoms of matchboxes,
marked them like dominoes, and played away. Vlasov eased his
tension by telling someone about the Consumer Cooperatives, and
his narrative always took on a comic touch.*° Yakov Petrovich
Kolpakov, the Chairman of the Sudogda District Executive Com-
mittee, a Bolshevik since the spring of 1917 who joined up at
the front, sat for dozens of days without changing his position,
Squeezing his head in his hands, his elbows on his knees, always
staring at the same spot on the wall. (It must have been so jolly
to recall the spring of 1917.) Vlasov’s garrulity irritated him:
“How can you?” And Vlasov snapped back at him: “And what
are you doing? Preparing yourself for heaven?” Vlasov spoke
with round “o’s” even in a fast retort. “For myself, I’ve decided
one thing only. I’m going to tell the executioner: “You alone,
not the judges, not the prosecutors, you alone are guilty of my
death, and you are going to have to live with it! If it weren't
for you willing executioners, there would be no death sen-
tences! So then let him kill me, the rat!”

Kolpakov was shot. Konstantin Sergeyevich Arkadyev, the
former Manager of the Aleksandrov District Agricultural De-
partment in Vladimir Province, was shot. Somehow, in his case,

10. His stories about the consumer cooperatives are remarkable and deserve
to be published.

The Supreme Measure | 453

the farewells were particularly hard. During the night six guards
came tramping in for him, making a big rush of it, while he,
gentle, well mannered, kept turning around, twisting his cap in
his hands, putting off the moment of his leavetaking—from the
last people on earth for him. And when he said his final “Fare-
well,” you could hardly hear his voice.

At the very first moment, when the victim has been pointed
out, the rest are relieved (It’s not me!). But right after he has
been taken away, the ones left behind are in a state that is hardly
any easier to bear than his. All the next day, those left behind
are destined to silence and they won’t want to eat.

However, Geraska, the young fellow who broke up the build-
ing of the village soviet, ate well and slept a lot, getting used to
things, even here, with typical peasant facility. He somehow
couldn’t believe they would shoot him. (And they didn’t. They
commuted his sentence to a tenner.)

Several of the inmates turned gray in three or four days before
their cellmates’ eyes.

When people wait so long for execution, their hair grows, and
orders are given for the whole cell to get haircuts, for the whole
cell to get baths. Prison existence goes on, without regard to
sentences.

Some individuals lost the ability to speak intelligibly and to
understand. But they were left there to await their fate anyway.
Anyone who went insane in the death cell was executed insane.

Many sentences were commuted. It was right then, in that fall
of 1937, that fifteen- and twenty-year terms were introduced for
the first time since the Revolution, and in many cases they
replaced the executioners’ bullets. There were also commuta-
tions to ten-year sentences. And even to five years. In the country
of miracles even such miracles as this were possible: yesterday
he deserved to be executed, and this morning he gets a juvenile
sentence; he is a minor criminal, and in camp he may even be
able to move around without convoy.

V. N. Khomenko, a sixty-year-old Cossack captain from the
Kuban, was also imprisoned in their cell. He was the “soul of the
cell,” if a death cell can be said to have a soul: he cracked jokes;
he smiled to himself; he didn’t act as if things were bad. He had
become unfit for military service way back after the Japanese

454 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

War, had studied horse breeding, and then served in the pro-
vincial local self-government council; by the thirties he was at-
tached to the Ivanovo Provincial Agricultural Department as
“inspector of the horse herd of the Red Army.” In other words, he
was supposed to see to it that the best horses went to the army. He
was arrested and sentenced to be shot for wrecking—for recom-
mending that stallions be gelded before the age of three, by which
means he allegedly “subverted the fighting capacity of the Red
Army.” Khomenko appealed the verdict. Fifty-five days later the
block supervisor came around and pointed out to him that he had
addressed his appeal to the wrong appeals jurisdiction. Right then
and there, propping the paper against the wall and using the
block supervisor’s pencil, Khomenko crossed out one jurisdiction
and substituted another, as if it were a request for a pack of
cigarettes. Thus clumsily corrected, the appeal made the rounds
for another sixty days, so Khomenko had been awaiting death for
four months. (As for waiting a year or two, after all, we spend
year after year waiting for the angel of death! Isn’t our whole
world just a death cell?) And one day complete rehabilitation for
Khomenko arrived. (In the interval since his sentence, Voroshilov
had given orders that gelding should be done before age three.)
Die one minute and dance the next!

Many sentences were commuted, and many prisoners had high
hopes. But Vlasov, comparing his case with those of the others,
and keeping in mind his conduct at the trial as the principal
factor, felt that things were likely to go badly for him. They had
to shoot someone. They probably had to shoot at least half of
those condemned to death. So he came to believe they would
shoot him. And he wanted just one thing—not to bow his head
when it happened. That recklessness which was one of his charac-
teristics returned to him and increased within him, and he was all
set to be bold and brazen to the very end.

And an opportunity came his way. Making the rounds of the
prison for some reason—most likely just to give himself a thrill
—the Chief of the Investigation Department of Ivanovo State
Security, Chinguli, ordered the door of their cell opened and
stood on the threshold. He spoke to someone and asked: “Who is
here from the Kady case?”

He was dressed in a short-sleeved silk shirt, which had just
begun to appear in Russia and therefore still seemed effeminate.

The Supreme Measure | 455

And either he or his shirt was doused in a sweetish perfume that
drifted into the cell.

Vlasov swiftly jumped up on the cot and shouted shrilly: “What
kind of colonial officer is this? Get out of here, you murderer!”
And from that height he spat juicily full into Chinguli’s face.

And he hit his mark.

Chinguli wiped his face and retreated. Because he had no right
to enter the cell without six guards, and maybe not even with six
guards either.

A reasonable rabbit ought not to behave in that fashion. What
if Chinguli had been dealing with your case at that moment and
was the one to decide whether to commute or not? After all, he
must have had a reason for asking: “Who is here from the Kady
case?” That was probably why he came.

But there is a limit, and beyond it one is no longer willing, one
finds it too repulsive, to be a reasonable little rabbit. And that is
the limit beyond which rabbits are enlightened by the common
understanding that all rabbits are foredoomed to become only
meat and pelts, and that at best, therefore, one can gain only a
postponement of death and not life in any case. That is when one
wants to shout: “Curse you, hurry up and shoot!”

It was this particular feeling of rage which took hold of Vlasov
even more intensely during his forty-one days of waiting for
execution. In the Ivanovo Prison they had twice suggested that he
write a petition for pardon, but he had refused.

But on the forty-second day they summoned him to a box
where they informed him that the Presidium of the Supreme
Soviet had commuted the supreme measure of punishment to
twenty years of imprisonment in corrective-labor camps with dis-
enfranchisement for five additional years.

The pale Vlasov smiled wryly, and even at that point words
did not fail him:

“It is strange. I was condemned for lack of faith in the victory
of socialism in our country. But can even Kalinin himself believe
in it if he thinks camps will still be needed in our country twenty
years from now?”

At the time it seemed quite inconceivable: after twenty years.
Strangely, they were still needed even after thirty.

Chapter 12

Tyurzak

Oh, that good Russian word “ostr6g”—-meaning “jail.” What
a powerful word it is and how well put together. One senses in it
the strength of those thick, impenetrable walls from which one
cannot escape. And it is all expressed in just six letters. And it
has so many interesting connotations deriving from words that
are close to it in sound: as, for instance, str6gost—meaning
“severity”; and ostroga—meaning “harpoon”; and ostrota—
meaning “sharpness” (the sharpness of the porcupine’s quills when
they land in your snout, the sharpness of the blizzard lashing your
frozen face, the sharpness of the pointed stakes of the camp
perimeter, and the sharpness of the barbed wire too); and the
word “ostorézhnost”—meaning “caution” (a convict’s caution ) —
is somewhere close too; and then the word “rog”—meaning
“horn.” Yes, indeed, the horn juts out boldly and is pointed for-
ward! It is aimed straight at us.

And if one glances over all Russia’s jail customs and conduct,
at the entire institution during, say, the last ninety years, then
you'll see not just one horn really, but two horns. The Narodnaya
Volya (“People’s Will”) revolutionaries began at the tip of one
horn, right where it gores, right where it’s too excruciatingly pain-
ful to take even on the breastbone. They kept wearing it down
gradually until it got rounded off, shrank to a stump, and was
hardly a horn any longer, and finally became just a woolly open
spot (this was the beginning of the twentieth century). But then,

456

Tyurzak | 457

after 1917, the first swelling of a new knob could be felt, and
there, there, splaying out and with the slogan “You don’t have
the right!”—it began to thrust upward again, and to narrow to a
point and harden, to acquire a horny surface—until by 1938 it
was pinning the human being right in that gap between the collar-
bone and the neck: tyurzak!* And once a year, the single stroke
of a watchman’s bell could be heard in the night in the distance:
“TONnnnonn!”?

If we pursue this parabola with the help of one of the prisoners
in the Schliisselburg Fortress near St. Petersburg, we find that in-
itially things were pretty bad.® The prisoner had a number, and
no one called him by his family name; the gendarmes acted as if
they had been trained in the Lubyanka. They didn’t speak a word
on their own. If you stammered out: “We... ,” the reply came:
“Speak only for yourself!” The silence of the grave. The cell was
in eternal shadows, the windows were frosted glass, the floor
asphalt. The hinged ventilation pane in the window was open for
forty minutes a day. The food consisted of grits and cabbage soup
without meat. They would not allow you any scholarly books
from the library. You wouldn’t see another human being for two
years at a stretch. Only after three years would they let you have
sheets of paper—numbered.* And then, little by little, things got
to be more lenient as the point of the horn got rounded off; there
was white bread; and then the prisoners were allowed tea and
sugar; one could have money and could buy things in addition
to the rations; smoking was permitted; they put transparent glass
in the windows; and the transom could be kept open all the time;
they painted the walls a light color; in no time at all you could
get books by subscribing to the St. Petersburg library; there
were gratings between the garden plots; one could converse
through them, and prisoners even delivered lectures to other
prisoners. By then the prisoners were urging the prison adminis-
tration: “Give us more land to work on, more!” So they planted

1. Tyurzak=TYURemnoye ZAKlyucheniye=prison confinement. Tyurzak is
an Official term.

2. TON=Tyurma Osobogo Naznacheniya=Special Purpose Prison. TON is
likewise an official abbreviation.

3. Vera Figner, Zapechatlenny Trud: Vospominaniya v Dvukh Tomakh
(Impressed Labor: Memoirs in Two Volumes), Moscow, “Mysl,” 1964.

4, According to the account of M. Novorussky, from 1884 to 1906 three
prisoners in Schliisselburg committed suicide and five others went insane.

458 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

two large prison courtyards in flowers and vegetables—no fewer
than 450 varieties! And then there were scientific collections, a
carpentry shop, a smithy, and they could earn money and buy
books, even Russian political books,° and also magazines from
abroad. And they wrote their families and got letters from them.
And they could go out to walk the whole gay long if they liked.

And gradually, as Figner recollects, “it was no longer the
superintendent who shouted at the prisoners, but we who shouted
at him.” In 1902, because he refused to forward a protest of hers,
she ripped the shoulder boards off his uniform. And the result
was that a military investigator came and apologized profusely to
Figner for the ignoramus superintendent!

How did that horn come to shrink and broaden? Figner ex-
plains it to some extent by the humanitarian attitudes of indi-
vidual prison superintendents, and also by the fact that the “gen-
darmes became friendly with the prisoners,” got used to them. One
significant factor certainly was the prisoners’ determination and
dignity and adroitness in conducting themselves. But nonetheless
I myself believe that it was the temper of the times: this moisture
and freshness in the air which drove away the thundercloud; this
breeze of freedom, which was sweeping through society, it was
decisive. Without it one could have given the gendarmes instruc-
tions from the Short Course every Monday, and kept tightening
things up, kept putting the screws on. And instead of “impressed
labor,” Vera Nikolayevna Figner, for tearing off an officer’s
shoulder boards, would have gotten nine grams in the back of her
head in a cellar.

The weakening and shaking up of the Tsarist prison system
did not come about on its own, of course, but because all society,
in concert with the revolutionaries, was shaking it up and ridi-
culing it in every possible way. Tsarism lost its chance to survive
not in the street skirmishes of February but several decades earlier,
when youths from well-to-do families began to consider a prison
term an honor; when army officers (even guard officers) began
to regard it as dishonorable to shake the hand of a gendarme.
And the more the prison system weakened, the more clearly

5. P. A. Krasikov, who, as we have seen, later condemned the Metropolitan
Veniamin to death, read Marx’s Capital in the Peter and Paul Fortress. (But
he was there only a year, and then they let him out.)

Tyurzak | 459

evident were the triumphant ethics of the political prisoners, and
the more visibly did the members of the revolutionary parties
realize their strength and regard their own laws as superior to
those of the state.

And that was how Russia of 1917 arrived, bearing 1918 on its
shoulders. The reason we have proceeded immediately to 1918 is
that the subject of our investigation does not permit us to dwell
on 1917. In February, 1917, all political prisons, both those
used for interrogation and those in which sentences were served,
and all hard-labor prisons as well were emptied. It is a wonder
that all the jailers managed to get through the year. Perhaps to
make ends meet they simply set to work raising potatoes in their
vegetable gardens. (But from 1918 on, things began to get much
better for them, and at Shpalernaya Prison they were still serving
the new regime even in 1928, and why not!)

In December, 1917, it had already become clear that it was
altogether impossible to do without prisons, that some people
simply couldn’t be left anywhere except behind bars (see Chap-
ter 2, above), because—well, simply because there was no place
for them in the new society. And so it was that the new rulers
managed to feel their way across the space between the two
horns and grope for the budding of the second horn.

Of course, they proclaimed immediately that the horrors of the
Tsarist prisons would not be repeated; that fatiguing correction
would not be permitted; that there would be no compulsory
silence in prison, no solitary confinement, no separating the
prisoners from one another during outdoor walks, no marching
in step and single file, not even any locked cells. Go ahead, dear
guests, get together, and talk as much as you like and complain
about the Bolsheviks. And the attention of the new prison authori-
ties was directed toward the combat readiness of the prison
guards outside the walls and the takeover of the stock of prisons
inherited from the Tsar. (This was one particular part of the
machinery of state that did not have to be destroyed and rebuilt
from its foundations.) Fortunately, it turned out that the Civil
War had not resulted in the destruction of all the principal
central prisons and jails. What was really necessary, however, was
to repudiate all those old, besmirched words. So now they called

6. Vyshinsky, Ot Tyurem k Vospitatelnym Uchrezhdeniyam.

460 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

them political isolators—political detention centers—demonstrat-
ing with this phrase their view of the members of once revolution-
ary parties as political enemies and stressing not the punitive role
of the bars but only the necessity of isolating (and only tempor-
arily, it appeared) these old-fashioned revolutionaries from the
onward march of the new society. So that was how the arches of
the old central prisons (evidently including the one in Suzdal
from the very beginning of the Civil War) came to receive SR’s,
Social Democrats, and Anarchists.

They all returned to prison with a consciousness of their rights
as convicts and a long-established tradition of how to stand up
for them. They accepted as their legal due a special political
ration (conceded by the Tsar and confirmed by the Revolution),
which included half a pack of cigarettes a day; purchases from the
market (cottage cheese, milk); unrestricted walks outdoors during
most hours of the day; being addressed with the formal personal
pronoun by prison personnel and not having to stand up when
addressed by them; confinement of husband and wife in the same
cell; the right to have newspapers, magazines, books, writing
materials, and personal articles, even including razors and scissors;
sending and receiving letters three times a month; visits from rela-
tives once a month; windows without bars, of course (at that time
the concept of the “muzzle” did not exist) ; unrestricted visits from
cell to cell; courtyards with greenery and lilacs for outdoor walks;
the freedom to choose companions for outdoor walks and to toss
small mailbags from one courtyard to another; and the dispatching
of pregnant women from prison into exile two months before they
were due to give birth.’

All this was just the politregime—the prison regimen for po-
litical prisoners. But the political prisoners of the twenties re-
membered well something even more important: self-government
for political prisoners, and hence even in prison the sense of one-
self as part of a whole, a member of a community. Self-govern-
ment (the free election of spokesmen who represented all the
interests of all the prisoners in negotiations with the prison ad-
ministration.) weakened the pressure on the individual because all
shoulders bore it together; and it augmented each protest because
all voices spoke as one.

7. From 1918 on, they did not hesitate to imprison women SR’s, even when
they were pregnant.

Tyurzak | 461

They undertook to defend all this! And the prison authorities
undertook to take it all away from them. And a silent battle began
in which no artillery shells were fired, and rifle shots only rarely,
and the crash of broken glass wasn’t audible even half a verst
away. A mute struggle went on for vestiges of freedom, for
vestiges of the right to have individual opinions, and it went on
for almost twenty years—but no large, richly illustrated volumes
describing it have ever been published. And all its ups-and-downs,
its catalogue of victories and of defeats, are almost lost to us now,
because, after all, there is no written language in the Archipelago
and oral communication is broken off when people die. And only
random particles of that struggle have occasionally come down to
us, illuminated by moonlight that is indirect and indistinct.

And since that time we have grown so supercilious! We are
familiar with tank battles; we know about nuclear explosions.
What kind of struggle is it over the question of whether cells are
kept locked and whether prisoners, to exercise their right to com-
municate, can openly spell out messages to each other by knock-
ing on the walls, shout from window to window, drop notes from
floor to floor on threads, and insist that at least the elected spokes-
men of the various party fractions be allowed to move freely
among the cells? What sort of a struggle is it to us when the chief
of the Lubyanka goes into the cell and the Anarchist Anna
G va (in 1926) or the SR Katya Olitskaya (1931) refuses
to stand up when he enters? And that savage beast thought up a
punishment for Katya: to deprive her of the right to go to the
toilet. What kind of struggle was it when two girls, Shura and
Vera (in 1925), in protest against the Lubyanka rule—intended
to stifle personality—that conversations may be carried on only
in whispers, sang loudly in their cell (only about lilacs and the
spring), and thereupon the prison chief, the Latvian Dukes,
dragged them through the corridor to the toilet by their hair? Or
when the students in a Stolypin car en route from Leningrad
(1924) sang revolutionary songs and the convoy thereupon de-
prived them of water? They yelled out: “A Tsarist convoy
wouldn’t have done that!” and the convoy beat them. Or when the
SR Kozlov, at the transit prison in Kem, loudly called the guards
“executioners’—and because of that was dragged off and
beaten?

After all, we have gotten used to regarding as valor only valor

462 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

in war (or the kind that’s needed for flying in outer space), the
kind which jingle-jangles with medals. We have forgotten another
concept of valor—civil valor. And that’s all our society needs,
just that, just that, just that! That’s all we need and that’s exactly
what we haven't got.

In 1923, in Vyatka Prison, the SR Struzhinsky and his com-
rades (how many were there? who were they? what were they
protesting against?) barricaded themselves in a cell, poured kero-
sene over all the mattresses, and incinerated themselves. Now
that was an act altogether in the tradition of Scl.liisselburg before
the Revolution; and, not to go further, what an uproar such an
act provoked then, before the Revolution, and how all Russian
society was aroused! But this time around neither Vyatka knew
about them, nor Moscow, nor history. And yet the human flesh
crackled in the flames in exactly the same way.

That was the initial purpose of imprisonment on the Solovetsky
Islands (nicknamed Solovki): it was such a good place, cut off
from communication with the outside world for half a year at a
time. You couldn’t be heard from there no matter how loud you
shouted, and you could even burn yourself up for all anyone
would know. In 1923 the imprisoned socialists were transported
there from Pertominsk on the Onega Peninsula—and split up
among three isolated monasteries.

Take Savvatyevsky Monastery, consisting of the two buildings
which had formerly been guest quarters for religious believers on
pilgrimage. Part of the lake was included in the prison compound.
In the early months everything seemed to be all right: they had
their special political regimen, several relatives succeeded in get-
ting there for visits, and three spokesmen from the three parties
were wholly responsible for negotiating with the prison adminis-
tration. And the monastery compound was a free zone. Inside it
the prisoners could talk, think, and do as they pleased without
hindrance.

But even then, at the dawn of the Archipelago, there were in-
sistent unpleasant latrine rumors (not yet so called) to the effect
that the special political regimen was going to be liquidated.

And, in reality, having waited until the middle of December,
until the White Sea was no longer navigable, with the consequent
cutoff in all communication with the outside world, the chief of

Tyurzak | 463

the Solovetsky Camp, Eichmans,* announced that new instruc-
tions had indeed been received regarding the regimen. They
wouldn’t, of course, take everything away, not by any means!
They would cut down on correspondence, and then on something
else, too, and, as the most keenly felt measure of the lot, from
that day on, December 20, 1923, the right to go in and out of
prison buildings twenty-four hours a day would be curtailed—
limited to the daylight hours up to 6 P.M.

The party fractions decided to protest, and the SR’s and An-
archists called for volunteers: on the first day of the new pro-
hibition they would go outside exactly at 6 P.M. But, as it turned
out, Nogtyev, the chief of the Savvatyevsky Monastery Prison,
had such an itchy trigger finger that even before the appointed
hour of 6 (and maybe their watches showed different times; after
all, there was no checking it by radio in those days), the guards
entered the compound with rifles and opened fire on the prisoners
there, who were out of doors quite legally. Three volleys killed
six and critically wounded three.

The next day Eichmans himself showed up: there had been an
unfortunate misunderstanding. Nogtyev was removed (trans-
ferred and promoted). A funeral was held for the victims. They
sang in chorus across the Solovetsky wilderness:

You fell a victim in a fateful fray.

(Was not this perhaps the last occasion when that long-drawn-out
melody was permitted for newly dead victims?) They pushed a
great boulder onto the common grave and carved on it the names
of those who had been killed.®

One cannot say that the press concealed this event. Pravda,
for example, carried a report in small type: the prisoners had
attacked the convoy, and six had been killed. The honest news-
paper Rote Fahne reported revolt on Solovki.’

8. How like Eichmann, is it not?

9. In 1925 the stone was overturned, and the names on it were thus buried
too. Any of you who clamber about Solovki—seek it out and gaze upon it!

10. One of the SR’s in the Savvatyevsky Monastery was Yuri Podbelsky.
He collected the medical documents on the Solovetsky massacre—for publica-
tion at some future date. But a year later, at the Sverdlovsk Transit Prison,
they discovered a false bottom in his suitcase and confiscated the material he’d
hidden. And that is how Russian history stumbles and falls.

464 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

Yet the prisoners had defended the regimen successfully! And
for a whole year no one spoke of changing it.

For the whole of 1924, yes. But toward the end of the year,
insistent rumors circulated again that they were planning to in-
troduce a new system in December. The Dragon had grown
hungry again. He wanted new victims. So even though the three
monasteries in which socialists were confined—Savvatyevsky,
Troitsky, and Muksalmsky—were on separate islands, they man-
aged, by conspiratorial methods, to reach an agreement. that all
the party fractions in all three monasteries would on one and the
same day deliver an ultimatum to Moscow and to the Solovki ad-
ministration: They must either be removed from the Solovetsky
Islands before navigation stopped or else the previous political
regimen must be left unchanged. The ultimatum stipulated a
time limit of two weeks, and then all three prisons would go on a
hunger strike.

This kind of unity compelled attention. It wasn’t the sort of
thing you could allow to go in one ear and out the other. One
day before the time limit expired, Eichmans visited each monas-
tery and announced that Moscow had refused. And on the ap-
pointed day a hunger strike began (not a dry hunger strike—
water was allowed) in all three monastery prisons (which were
now unable to communicate with each other). In Savvatyevsky,
about two hundred people struck. Those who fell ill were ex-
empted from striking. A doctor from among the prisoners ex-
amined the strikers every day. A collective hunger strike is always
more difficult to carry out than an individual one; after all, the
weakest rather than the strongest of the strikers can determine its
outcome. The only point to a hunger strike is to carry it out with
implacable determination and in such a way that everyone knows
everyone else involved personally and trusts them fully. Given
various party fractions, given several hundred people, both dis-
agreements and moral anguish on other people’s behalf were in-
evitable. After fifteen days, it was necessary to vote by secret
ballot in Savvatyevsky—the urn with the ballots was taken from
room to room—whether to continue or to lift the hunger strike.

And Moscow and Eichmans waited them out! After all, they
were well fed, and there wasn’t a peep from the capital news-
papers about the hunger strike, and there were no student pro-

Tyurzak | 465

test meetings at Kazan Cathedral. Silence was already confi-
dently shaping our history.

The monasteries lifted the hunger strike. They had not won
out, but they hadn’t lost either. The political regimen was left
intact for the winter, except that cutting firewood in the forests
was added, but that was logical enough. And in the spring of 1925
it looked as though the hunger strike had brought victory: the
prisoners from all three monastery prisons were removed from
Solovki! To the mainland! No more Arctic night and no more
half-year cut off from communication!

But both the convoy and their.rations en route were very harsh
for that time. And soon they were all perfidiously tricked: On
the pretext that their spokesmen would be more comfortable in
the “staff” car with the stores and equipment, they were deprived
of their leaders. The “staff” car was detached at Vyatka, and the
spokesmen were taken to the Tobolsk Isolator. Only at that point
did it become clear that the hunger strike of the previous fall had
failed. The strong and influential spokesmen had been taken away
so as to tighten up on the rest. Yagoda and Katanyan personally
directed the incarceration of the former Solovetsky Islands pris-
oners in the long-standing but until then unused buildings of the
Verkhne-Uralsk Isolator, which they thus “opened” in the spring
of 1925 (under Chief Dupper). It was destined to be a particular
bugbear to prisoners for many decades ahead.

The relocated former Solovki prisoners immediately lost their
freedom to move about. The cells were locked. They succeeded
in electing spokesmen nonetheless, but the spokesmen didn’t have
the right to go from:cell to cell. The unlimited circulation between
cells of money, personal articles, and books, which had existed
earlier, was now forbidden. They shouted back and forth from
window to window—until the guard fired from his tower into the
cells. In reply they organized a protest—they broke windowpanes
and destroyed prison equipment. (And, after all, breaking a
windowpane is something to think about twice. They might just
not replace it all winter, and there would be no big surprise in
that. It was under the Tsar that the glaziers used to come on the
run.) The struggle continued, but it was now being carried on in
desperation and under grave handicaps.

In the year 1928 (according to Pyotr Petrovich Rubin) some

466 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

event or other precipitated a new joint hunger strike by the entire
Verkhne-Uralsk Isolator. But this time the earlier stern and
solemn atmosphere was absent, as were the approval of friends
and a doctor of their own. On a certain day of the strike, the
jailers came bursting into the cells in overwhelming numbers,
and simply began to beat the weakened prisoners with clubs and
boots. They beat them to within an inch of their lives—and the
hunger strike ended.

From our experience of the past and our literature of the past we
have derived a naive faith in the power of a hunger strike. But the
hunger strike is a purely moral weapon. It presupposes that the
jailer has not entirely lost his conscience. Or that the jailer is
afraid of public opinion. Only in such circumstances can it be
effective.

The Tsarist jailers were still inexperienced. They got nervous
if one of their prisoners went on a hunger strike; they exclaimed
over it; they looked after him; they put him in the hospital. There
are many examples, but this work is not about them. It is even
humorous to note that it was enough for Valentinov to go on a
hunger strike for twelve days: as a result, he not only achieved
some relaxation in the regimen but was totally released from in-
terrogation—whereupon he went to Lenin in Switzerland. Even
in the Orel central hard-labor prison the strikers always won.
They got the regimen relaxed in 1912 and further relaxed in
1913, to the point of general access to outdoor walks for all
political hard-labor prisoners—who were obviously so unre-
stricted by their supervisors that they managed to compose and
send out to freedom their appeal “to the Russian people.” (And
this from the hard-labor prisoners of a central prison!) Further-
more, it was published. (It’s enough to make one’s eyes pop out
of one’s head! Someone has to have been crazy!) It was published
in 1914 in issue No. 1 of the Vestnik Katorgi i Ssylki—the Hard-
Labor and Exile Herald. (And what about that Herald itself?

11. M. N. Gernet, Istoriya Tsarskoi Tyurmy (A History of Czarist Prisons),
Moscow, Yuridicheskaya Literatura (Legal Literature Publishers), 1960-1963,
Vol. V, Ch. 8.

Tyurzak | 467

Should we, too, perhaps try to publish one like it?) In 1914,
after only five days of a hunger strike—admittedly, without water
—Dzerzhinsky and four of his comrades obtained all their nu-
merous demands (which had to do with living conditions).

In those years, there were no dangers or difficulties for the
prisoner beyond the torments of hunger. They could not beat
him up for going on a hunger strike, nor sentence him to a second
term, nor increase his term, nor shoot him, nor send him off on
a prisoner transport. (All this was to come later on.)

In the Revolution of 1905 and the years following it, the
prisoners felt themselves to be masters of the prison to such an
extent that they did not even go to the trouble of declaring a
hunger strike; they simply destroyed prison property (so-called
“obstructions” ), or went so far as to declare a strike, although it
might seem that for prisoners this would have hardly any mean-
ing. Thus in the city of Nikolayev in 1906, 197 prisoners in the
local prison declared a “strike” in conjunction with people outside.
Outside the prison, leaflets in support of their strike were pub-
lished and daily meetings assembled in front of the prison. These
meetings (and it goes without saying that the prisoners were at
the windows, which had, of course, no “muzzles”) forced the
administration to accept the demands of the “striking” prisoners.
After this, some people on the street and others behind the bars
joined in singing revolutionary songs. And things went on that
way for eight days. (And nobody stopped them! It was, after all,
a year of postrevolutionary repression.) On the ninth day all the
demands of the prisoners were satisfied! Similar incidents oc-
curred at the time in Odessa, in Kherson, and in Yelizavetgrad.
That’s how easily victory was attained then.

It would be interesting, incidentally, to compare the effective-
ness of hunger strikes under the Provisional Government, but
those few Bolsheviks imprisoned from the July days until the
Kornilov episode (Kamenev, Trotsky, and Raskolnikov for a
while longer) evidently had no reason to go on a hunger strike.

In the twenties, the lively picture of hunger strikes grows
clouded (though that depends, of course, on the point of
view ...). This widely known weapon, which had justified itself
so gloriously, was, of course, taken over not only by recognized

12. Ibid.

468 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

“politicals” but also by those who were not recognized as such—
the KR’s (Article 58—Counter-Revolutionaries) and all other
kinds of riffraff. However, those arrows which used to be so
piercing had been blunted somehow, or else some iron hand had
checked them in midflight. True, written declarations of impend-
ing hunger strikes were still accepted, and nothing subversive was
seen in them as yet. But unpleasant new rules were trotted out:
The hunger striker had to be isolated in a special solitary cell
(in the Butyrki it was in the Pugachev Tower). It was essential
to keep any knowledge about the hunger strike not only from
people outside, who might protest publicly, and from prisoners
in cells nearby, but even from those in the cell in which the hunger
striker had been imprisoned until that day—for that, too, con-
stituted a public, and it was necessary to separate him from it.
This measure had as its nominal justification the argument that
the prison administration had to make sure that the hunger strike
was going on honestly—that others in the cell weren’t sneaking
food to the hunger striker. (And how had that been verified
previously? Through honest, “cross my heart” word of honor?)

Still, it was possible in those years to achieve at least one’s
personal demands by this means.

From the thirties on, state thinking about hunger strikes took
a new turn. What did the state want with even such watered-down,
isolated, half-suppressed hunger strikes? Wasn’t the ideal picture
one of prisoners who had no will of their own, nor the capacity to
make their own decisions—and of a prison administration that
did their thinking and their deciding for them? These are, if you
will, the only prisoners who can exist in the new society. And
so from the beginning of the thirties, they stopped accepting
declarations of hunger strikes as legal. “The hunger strike as a
method of resistance no longer exists,” they proclaimed to Yeka-
terina Olitskaya in 1932, and they said.the same thing. to many
others.. The government has abolished your hunger strikes—and
that’s that. But Olitskaya refused to obey and began to fast. They
let her go on fasting in solitary for fifteen days. Then they took
her to the hospital and put milk and dried crusts in front of her
to tempt her. But she stood firm, and'on the nineteenth day she
won her victory: she got an extended outdoor period and news-
papers and parcels from the Political Red Cross. (That’s how one

Tyurzak | 469

had to moan and groan in order to receive those legitimate relief
parcels!) Overall, however, it was an insignificant victory and
paid for too dearly. Olitskaya recalls such foolish hunger strikes
on the part of others too: people starved up to twenty days in
order to get delivery of a parcel or a change of companions for
their outdoor walk. Was it worth it? After all, in the New Type
Prison one’s strength, once lost, could not be restored. The
religious-sect member Koloskov fasted until he died on the
twenty-fifth day. Could one in general permit oneself to fast in
the New Type Prison? After all, the new prison heads, operating
in secrecy and silence, had acquired several powerful methods of
combating hunger strikes:

1. Patience on the part of the administration. (We have seen
enough of what this meant from preceding examples. )

2. Deception. This, too, can be practiced thanks to total
secrecy. When every step is reported by the newspapers, you
aren’t going to do much deceiving. But in our country, why not?
In 1933, in the Khabarovsk Prison, S. A. Chebotaryev, demand-
ing that his family be informed of his whereabouts, fasted for
seventeen days. (He had come from the Chinese Eastern Railroad
in Manchuria and then suddenly disappeared, and he was worried
about what his wife might be thinking.) On the seventeenth day,
Zapadny, the Deputy Chief of the Provincial GPU, and the
Khabarovsk Province prosecutor (their ranks indicate that lengthy
hunger strikes were really not so frequent) came to see him and
showed him a telegraph receipt (There, they said, they had in-
formed his wife!), and thus persuaded him to take some broth.
-~ And the receipt was a fake! (Why had these high-ranking officials
gone to this trouble? Not, certainly, for Chebotaryev’s life. Evi-
dently, in the first half of the thirties there was still some sort of
personal responsibility on the part of higher-ups for long-drawn-
out hunger strikes. )

3. Forced artificial feeding. This method was adapted, with-
out any question, from experience with wild animals in captivity.
And it could be employed only in total secrecy. By 1937 arti-
ficial feeding was, evidently, already in wide use. For example,
in the group hunger strike of socialists in the Yaroslavl Central
Prison, artificial feeding was forced on everyone on the fifteenth
day.

470 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

Artificial feeding has much in common with rape. And that’s
what it really is: four big men hurl themselves on one weak being
and deprive it of its one interdiction—they only need to do it
once and what happens to it next is not important. The element
of rape inheres in the violation of the victim’s will: “It’s not going
to be the way you want it, but the way I want it; lie down and sub-
mit.” They pry open the mouth with a flat disc, then broaden the
crack between the jaws and insert a tube: “Swallow it.” And if
you don’t swallow it, they shove it farther down anyway and then
pour liquefied food right down the esophagus. And then they
massage the stomach to prevent the prisoner from resorting to
vomiting. The sensation is one of being morally defiled, of
sweetness in the mouth, and a jubilant stomach gratified to the
point of delight.

Science did not stand still, and other methods were developed
for artificial feeding: an enema through the anus, drops through
the nose.

4. A new view of the hunger strike: that hunger strikes are a
continuation of counterrevolutionary activity in prison, and must
be punished with a new prison term. This aspect promised to give
rise to a very rich new category in the practices of the New Type
Prison, but it remained essentially in the realm of threats. And
it was not, of course, any sense of humor that cut it short, but
most likely simple laziness: why bother with all that when
patience will take care of it? Patience and more patience—the
patience of a well-fed person vis-a-vis one who is starving.

Approximately in the middle of 1937, a new directive came:
From now on the prison administration will not in any respect
be responsible for those dying on hunger strikes! The last vestige
of personal responsibility on the part of the jailers had disap-
peared! (In these circumstances, the prosecutor of the province
would not have come to visit Chebotaryev!) Furthermore, so that
the interrogator shouldn’t get disturbed, it was also announced
that days spent on hunger strike by a prisoner under interroga-
tion should be crossed off the official interrogation period. In
other words, it should not only be considered that the hunger
strike had not taken place, but the prisoner should be regarded
as not having been in prison at all during the period of the strike.
Thus the interrogator would not be to blame for being behind

Tyurzak | 471

schedule. Let the only perceptible result of the hunger strike be
the prisoner’s exhaustion!

And that meant: If you want to kick the bucket, go ahead!

Arnold Rappoport had the misfortune to declare a hunger
strike in the Archangel NKVD Internal Prison at the very
moment when this directive arrived. It was a particularly severe
form of hunger strike, and that ought, it would seem, to have
given it more impact. His was a “dry” strike—without fluids—
and he kept it up for thirteen days. (Compare the five-day “dry”
strike of Dzerzhinsky, who probably wasn’t isolated in a separate
cell. And who in the end won total victory.) And during those
thirteen days in solitary, to which Rappoport had been moved,
only a medical assistant looked in now and then. No doctor came.
And no one from the administration took the slightest interest
in what he was demanding with his hunger strike. They never
even asked him. The only attention the administration paid him
was to search his cell carefully, and they managed to dig out
some hidden makhorka and several matches. What Rappoport
wanted was to put an end to the interrogator’s humiliation of him.
He had prepared for his hunger strike in a thoroughly scientific
way. He had received a food parcel earlier, and so he ate only
butter and ring-shaped rolls, baranki, and he quit eating black
bread a week before his strike. He starved until he could see the
light through his hands. He recalls experiencing a sensation of
lightheadedness and clarity of thought. At a certain moment, a
kindly, compassionate woman jailer named Marusya came to
his cell and whispered to him: “Stop your hunger strike; it isn’t
going to help; you'll just die! You should have done it a week
earlier.” He listened to her and called off his hunger strike without
having gotten anywhere at all. Nevertheless, they gave him hot
red wine and a roll, and afterward the jailers took him back to the
common cell in a hand-carry. A few days later, his interrogation
began again. But the hunger strike had not been entirely useless:
the interrogator had come to understand that Rappoport had will
power enough and no fear of death, and he eased up on the
interrogation. “Well, now, it turns out you are quite a wolf,” the
interrogator said to him. “A wolf!” Rappoport affirmed. “And
Pll certainly never be your dog.”

Rappoport declared another hunger strike later on, at the

472 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

Kotlas Transit Prison, but it turned out somewhat comically. He
announced that he was demanding a new interrogation, and that
he would not board the prisoner transport. They came to him on
the third day: “Get ready for the prisoner transport.” “You don't
have the right. I’m on a hunger strike!” At that point four young
toughs picked him up, carried him off, and tossed him into the
bath. After the bath, they carried him to the guardhouse. With
nothing else left to do, Rappoport stood up and went to join the
column of prisoners boarding the prisoner transport—after all,
there were dogs and bayonets at his back.

And that is how the New Type Prison defeated bourgeois
hunger strikes.

Even a strong man had no way left him to fight the prison
machine, except perhaps suicide. But is suicide really resistance?
Isn’t it actually submission?

The SR Yekaterina Olitskaya thinks that the Trotskyites, and,
subsequently, the Communists who followed them into prison,
did a great deal to weaken the hunger strike as a weapon for
fighting back: they declared hunger strikes too easily and lifted
them too easily. She says that even the Trotskyite leader I. N.
Smirnov, after going on a hunger strike four days before their
Moscow trial, quickly surrendered and lifted it. They say that up
to 1936 the Trotskyites rejected any hunger strike against the
Soviet government on principle, and never supported SR’s and
Social Democrats who were on hunger strikes.**

Let history say how true or untrue that reproach is. However,
no one paid for hunger strikes so much and so grievously as the
Trotskyites. (We will come to their hunger strikes and their
strikes in camps in Part III.)

Excessive haste in declaring and lifting hunger strikes was
probably characteristic of impetuous temperaments which reveal
their feelings too quickly. But there were, after all, such natures,
such characters, among the old Russian revolutionaries, too, and
there were similar temperaments in Italy and France, but no-

13. But they always demanded support for themselves from the SR’s and
Social Democrats. On a prisoner transport to Karaganda and the Kolyma in
1936, they addressed as traitors and provocateurs all those who refused to sign
their telegram to Kalinin protesting “against sending the vanguard of the
Revolution [i.e., themselves] to the Kolyma.” (The story was told by Mako-
tinsky.)

Tyurzak | 473

where, either in prerevolutionary Russia, in Italy, or in France,
were the authorities so successful in discouraging hunger strikes
as in the Soviet Union. There was probably no less physical
sacrifice and no less spiritual determination in the hunger strikes
in the second quarter of our century than there had been in the
first. But there was no public opinion in the Soviet Union. And
on that basis the New Type Prison waxed and grew strong. And
instead of easy victories, the prisoners suffered hard-earned de-
feats.

Decades passed and time produced its own results. The hunger
strike—the first and most natural weapon of the prisoner—in
the end became alien and incomprehensible to the prisoners
themselves. Fewer and fewer desired to undertake them. And to
prison administrations the whole thing began to seem either
plain stupidity or else a malicious violation.

When, in 1960, Gennady Smelov, a nonpolitical offender,
declared a lengthy hunger strike in the Leningrad prison, the
prosecutor went to his cell for some reason (perhaps he was
making his regular rounds) and asked him: “Why are you tor-
turing yourself?”

And Smelov replied: “Justice is more precious to me than
life.”

This phrase so astonished the prosecutor with its irrelevance
that the very next day Smelov was taken to the Leningrad Special
Hospital (i.e., the insane asylum) for prisoners. And the doctor
there told him:

“We suspect you may be a schizophrenic.”

Along the rings of the horn, where it began to narrow to its
point, the former central prisons arose, rechristened, by the be-
ginning of 1937, the “special isolators.” The last little weaknesses
were now being squeezed out of the system, the last vestiges of
light and air. And the hunger strike of the tired socialists, their
numbers sparse by now, in the Yaroslavl Penalty Isolator at the
beginning of 1937 was one of their last, desperate efforts.

They were still demanding that everything should be restored
to what it once had been. They were demanding both the election

474 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

of spokesmen and free communication between cells, but it is
unlikely that even they had hopes of this any longer. By a fifteen-
day hunger strike, even though it ended with their being force-
fed through a tube, they had apparently succeeded in defending
some portions of their regimen: a one-hour period outdoors,
access to the provincial newspaper, notebooks for their writing.
These they kept. But the authorities promptly took away their
personal belongings and threw at them the common prison cloth-
ing of the special isolator. And a little while later, they cut half
an hour off their time outdoors. And then they reduced it by
another fifteen minutes.

These were the same people who were being dragged through
a sequence of prisons and exiles according to the rules of the
Big Solitaire. Some hadn’t lived an ordinary, decent human life
for ten years; some for fifteen; all they had was this meager prison
life, with hunger strikes to boot. A few who had gotten used to
winning out over the prison administrations before the Revolu-
tion were still alive. However, before the Revolution they were
marching in step with Time against a weakening enemy. And
now Time was against them and allied with an enemy growing
steadily stronger. Among them were young people too (how
strange that seems to us nowadays )—those who considered them-
selves SR’s, Social Democrats, or Anarchists even after the parties
themselves had been battered out of existence—and the only
future these new recruits had to look forward to was life in prison.

The loneliness surrounding the entire prison struggle of the
socialists, which became more hopeless with every year that
passed, grew more and more acute, approaching a vacuum in
the end. That was not how it had been under the Tsar: Throw
open the prison doors and the public greeted them with
flowers. Now they leafed through the newspapers and saw that
they were being drenched in vituperation, with slops even. (For
it was the socialists, after all, whom Stalin saw as the most dan-
gerous enemies of his socialism.) And the people were silent.
And what could give them any reason to dare suppose that the
people had any kindly feelings left toward those they had not
long before elected to the Constituent Assembly? And finally the
newspapers stopped showering profanity on them because Rus-
sian socialists had by that time come to seem so unimportant
and so impotent and even nonexistent. By this time these socialists

Tyurzak | 475

were remembered outside in freedom only as something belong-
ing to the past—the distant past. And young people hadn’t the
slightest idea that SR’s and Mensheviks were still alive some-
where. And in the sequence of Chimkent and Cherdyn exile, and
the Verkhne-Uralsk and Vladimir isolators—how could they
not tremble in their dark solitary-confinement cells, cells with
“muzzles” by this time, and feel that perhaps their program
and their leaders had been mistaken, that perhaps their tactics
and actions had been mistaken too? And all their actions began
to seem nothing but inaction—and their lives, devoted only to
suffering, a fatal delusion.

Their lonely prison struggle had been essentially undertaken
for all of us, for all future prisoners (even though they themselves
might not think so, nor understand this), for how we would exist
in imprisonment and how we would be kept there. And if they
had won out, then probably nothing of what happened to us
would have happened, nothing of what this book is about, all
seven of its parts.

But they were beaten. They failed to protect either themselves
or us.

In part, too, the canopy of loneliness spread over them because,
in the very first postrevolutionary years, having naturally accepted
from the GPU the well-merited identification of politicals, they
naturally agreed with the GPU that all who were “to the right’”**
of them, beginning with the Cadets, were not politicals but KR’s
—Counter-Revolutionaries—the manure of history. And they
also regarded as KR’s those who suffered for their faith in
Christ. And whoever didn’t know what “right” or “left” meant
—and that, in the future, would be all of us—they considered
to be KR’s also. And thus it was that, in part voluntarily, in
part involuntarily, keeping themselves aloof and shunning others,
they gave their blessing to the future “Fifty-eight” into whose
maw they themselves would disappear.

Objects and actions change their aspect quite decisively de-
pending on the position of the observer. In this chapter we have
been describing the prison stand of the socialists from their
point of view. And, as you see, it is illuminated by a pure and
tragic light. But those KR’s whom the politicals treated so con-

14. I do not like these “left” and “right” classifications; they are conditional
concepts, they are loosely bandied about, and they do not convey the essence.

476 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

temptuously on Solovki, those KR’s recall the politicals in their
own way! “The politicals? What a nasty crowd they were: they
looked down their noses at everyone else; they stuck to their own
group; they demanded their own special rations all the time and
their own special privileges. And they kept quarreling among
themselves incessantly.” And how can one but feel that there
is truth here too? All those fruitless and endless arguments which
by now are merely comical. And those demands for additional
rations for themselves in comparison with the masses of the
hungry and impoverished? In the Soviet period, the honorable
appellation of politicals turned out to be a poisoned gift. And
then another reproach followed immediately: Why was it that
the socialists, who used to escape so easily under the Tsar, had
become so soft in Soviet prisons? Where are their escapes? In
general there were quite a few escapes, but who can remember
any socialists among them?

And, in turn, those prisoners “to the left” of the socialists—the
Trotskyites and the Communists—shunned the socialists, con-
sidering them exactly the same kind of KR’s as the rest, and they
closed the moat of isolation around them with an encircling ring.

The Trotskyites and the Communists, each considering their
own direction more pure and lofty than all the rest, despised and
even hated the socialists (and each other) who were imprisoned
behind the bars of the same buildings and went outdoors to
walk in the same prison courtyards. Yekaterina Olitskaya recalls
that in 1937, at the transit prison on Vanino Bay, when the
socialists called to each other across the fence between the men’s
and women’s compounds, looking for fellow socialists and report-
ing news, the Communists Liza Kotik and Mariya Krutikova were
indignant because they might bring down punishment on them
all by such irresponsible behavior. They said: “All our mis-
fortunes are due to those socialist rats! [A profound explanation,
and so dialectical too!] They should be choked!” And those two
girls in the Lubyanka in 1925, whom I have already mentioned,
sang about spring and lilacs only because one of them was an
SR and the second a member of the Communist opposition, and
they had no political song in common, and in fact the Com-
munist-deviationist girl shouldn’t really have joined the SR girl
in her protest at all.

And if in a Tsarist prison the different parties often joined

Tyurzak | 477

forces in a common struggle (let us recall in this connection the
escape from the Sevastopol Central Prison), in Soviet prisons
each political group tried to ensure its own purity by steering
clear of the others. The Trotskyites struggled on their own, apart
from the socialists and Communists; the Communists didn’t
struggle at all, for how could one allow oneself to struggle against
one’s own government and one’s own prison?

It turned out in consequence that the Communists in isolators
and in prisons for long-termers were restricted earlier and more
cruelly than others. In 1928, in the Yaroslavl Central Prison,
the Communist Nadezhda Surovtseva went outdoors for fresh
air in a single-file column that was forbidden to engage in con-
versation, while the socialists were still chattering in their own
groups. She was not permitted to tend the flowers in the courtyard
—hbecause they had been left by previous prisoners who had
struggled for their rights. And they deprived her of newspapers
too. (However, the Secret Political Department of the GPU
permitted her to have complete sets of Marx and Engels, Lenin
and Hegel in her cell.) Her mother’s visit to her took place
virtually in the dark, and her downcast mother died soon after-
ward. (What must she have thought of her daughter’s circum-
stances in prison?)

The difference between the treatment of socialist prisoners and
that of the Communists persisted many years, went far beyond
this, and extended to a difference in rewards: in 1937—1938 the
socialists were imprisoned like the rest and they all got their
tenners too. But, as a rule, they were not forced to denounce
themselves: they had, after all, never hidden their own, special,
individual views—which were quite enough to get them sen-
tenced. But a Communist had no special, individual views, so
what, then, was he to be sentenced for if a self-denunciation wasn’t
forced out of him?

Even though the enormous Archipelago was already spreading
across the land, the prisons for long-termers didn’t fall into decay.
The old jail tradition was being zealously carried on. Every-
thing new and invaluable which the Archipelago had contributed
to the indoctrination of the masses was still not enough in itself.

478 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

The deficiency was provided for by the complementary existence
of the TON’s—the Special Purpose Prisons—and prisons for
long-termers in general.

Not everyone swallowed up by the Great Machine was allowed
to mingle with the natives of the Archipelago. Well-known
foreigners, individuals who were too famous or who were being
held secretly, purged gaybisty, could not by any means be seen
openly in camps; their hauling a barrow did not compensate for
the disclosure and the consequent moral-political’? damage. In
the same way, the socialists, who were engaged in a continuous
struggle for their prison rights, could not conceivably be permitted
to mingle with the masses but had to be kept separately and, in
fact, suffocated separately—in view of their special privileges
and rights. Much later on, in the fifties, as we shall learn later
in this work, the Special Purpose Prisons were also needed to
isolate camp rebels. And in the last years of his life, disappointed
in the possibilities of “reforming” thieves, Stalin gave orders that
various ringleaders of the thieves should also get tyurzak rather
than camp. And then, to be sure, it was necessary for the state
to support free of charge in prison those prisoners who because
of their feebleness would have immediately died off in camp and
would thus have shirked their duty to serve out their terms. And
others who couldn’t possibly be used in camp work—like the
blind Kopeikin, a man of seventy who used to sit all day long
in the market in Yuryevets on the Volga. His songs and facetious
comments won him ten years for KRD—Counter-Revolutionary
Activity—but in his case they had to substitute prison for camp.

The inventory of old jails, inherited from the Romanov dynasty,
was, of necessity, looked after, remodeled, strengthened, and
perfected. Certain central prisons, like the one in Yaroslavl, were
so well and suitably appointed (doors plated with iron; table,
stool, and cot permanently anchored in each cell) that the only
thing required to bring them up to date was the installation of
“muzzles” on the windows and the fencing in of the courtyards
where the prisoners walked in order to reduce them to the size
of a cell (by 1937 all the trees on prison grounds had been cut
down, all vegetable gardens plowed under, and all grassy areas
paved with asphalt). Others, like the one in Suzdal, required new

15. This term actually exists! And it has a sky-blue swampy coloration!

Tyurzak | 479

equipment, and the monastery arrangement had to be remodeled,
but, after all, self-incarceration of a body in a monastery and its
incarceration in a prison by the state serve physically similar
purposes, and therefore the buildings were always easy to adapt.
One of the buildings of the Sukhanovka Monastery was adapted
for use as a prison for long-termers. Of course, it was also neces-
sary to make up for losses from the Tsarist inventory: the con-
version of the Peter and Paul Fortress in Leningrad and of
Schlüsselburg near Leningrad into museums for tourists. The
Vladimir Central Prison was expanded and added to—with a
big new building constructed under Yezhov. It was heavily
used and garnered many prisoners over those decades. We have
already mentioned how the Tobolsk Central Prison was in-
augurated, and that Verkhne-Uralsk was opened in 1925 for
continuous and abundant use. (To our misfortune, all these isola-
tors are still in use and are in operation at the moment these lines
are being written.) From Tvardovsky’s poem “Distance Beyond
Distance” one can draw the conclusion that the Aleksandrovsk
Central Prison wasn’t empty in Stalin’s time either. We have less
information about the one in Orel: it is feared that it suffered
serious damage during World War II. But not far from it was
the well-equipped prison for long-termers in Dmitrovsk-Or-
lovsky.

During the twenties the prisoner’s food was very decent in the
isolators for politicals (still called “politizakrytki”—‘political
lock-ups”—by the prisoners): the lunches always included some
meat; fresh vegetables were served; milk could be bought in the
commissary. In 1931—1933 the food deteriorated sharply, but
things were no better out in freedom at that time. Both scurvy
and dizziness from lack of food were no rarity in the prisons for
politicals in those years. Later on the food improved, but it was
never the same as before. In 1947, in the Vladimir TON, I.
Korneyev was constantly hungry: one pound of bread, two pieces
of sugar, two hot dishes which were not at all filling; the only
thing available in unlimited quantities was boiling water. (It will,
of course, be said once more that this was not a typical year and
there was hunger outside in freedom, too, at the time. This was
when they generously allowed freedom to feed prison: unlimited
parcels were permitted.) The light in cells was always “rationed,”

480 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

so to speak, in both the thirties and the forties: the “muzzles”
on the windows and the frosted reinforced glass created a perma-
nent twilight in the cells (darkness is an important factor in
causing depression). They often stretched netting above the
window “muzzle,” and in the winter it was covered with snow,
which cut off this last access to the light. Reading became no
more than a way of ruining one’s eyes. In the Vladimir TON,
they made up for this lack of light at night: bright electric lights
burned all night long, preventing sleep. And in the Dmitrovsk
Prison in 1938 (N. A. Kozyrev), there was light in the evenings
and at night—a kerosene lamp on a little shelf way up near the
ceiling, that burned away and smoked up the last air; in 1939
there were electric lights that glowed red at half-voltage. Air was
“rationed” too. The hinged panes for ventilation were kept
locked, and opened only during the interval of the prisoners’
trip to the toilet, as prisoners recall from both Dmitrovsk and
Yaroslavl prisons. (Y. Ginzburg: The bread grew moldy between
morning and lunchtime; the sheets were damp, and the walls
green.) In Vladimir in 1948 there was no lack of air, because
the transom was open permanently. Walks outdoors ranged from
fifteen to forty-five minutes at various hours in various prisons.
There was no such thing as the communication with the soil that
had existed in Schlüsselburg or Solovki; everything that grew
had been torn up by the roots, trampled, covered with concrete
and asphalt. They even forbade lifting up one’s head to the
heavens during the walks: “Look at your feet!” This was the
command both Kozyrev and Adamova remember from the Kazan
Prison. Visits from relatives were forbidden in 1937 and never
renewed. Letters could be sent to close relatives twice a month
and could be received from them in most years. (But in Kazan
they had to be returned to the administration the day after they
had been read.) Access to the commissary to make purchases
with the money sent in specifically limited amounts was usually
permitted. Furniture was no unimportant part of the prison
regimen. Adamova wrote eloquently of her happiness at finding
a simple wooden cot with a straw mattress and a simple wooden
table in her cell in Suzdal, after having had only cots that folded
into the wall and chairs anchored to the floor. In the Vladimir
TON, I. Korneyev experienced two different prison regimens:

Tyurzak | 481

Under one, in 1947-1948, personal articles were not removed
from the cell; one could lie down during the day; and the turnkey
very seldom looked through the peephole. But under the other,
in 1949-1953, the cell was locked with two locks (the respon-
sibility of the turnkey and duty officer respectively); one was for-
bidden to lie down, forbidden to talk in a normal voice (in
Kazan, only in a whisper); personal articles were all taken away;
a uniform of striped mattress ticking was issued; correspondence
was permitted only twice a year and only on those days announced
without warning by the chief of the prison (anyone who missed
that day couldn’t write), and only a sheet of paper half the size
of a postal sheet could be used; violent searches and unscheduled
visits were frequent, requiring the complete turning out of one’s
belongings and undressing down to one’s skin. Communication
between cells was prohibited to such an extent that the jailers
went through the toilets with a portable lantern after each toilet
visit and searched in each hole. The entire cell would get punish-
ment cells for graffiti in the toilets. The punishment cells were a
scourge in the Special Purpose Prisons. One could get into a
punishment cell for coughing. (“Cover your head with your
blanket. Then you can cough!”) Or for walking around the cell
(Kozyrev: “It was considered to be rebellious”); for the noise
made by one’s shoes. (In the Kazan Prison women had been
issued men’s shoes that were much too large for women’s feet—
size 1042.) Incidentally, Ginzburg was correct in concluding
that periods in a punishment cell were meted out not for any
particular misdemeanor but according to a schedule: every pri-
soner was required to spend some time there in order to learn
what it was like. And the rules included another generally appli-
cable point: “In the event of any display of unruliness in a punish-
ment cell [?], the chief of the prison has the right to extend the
term of incarceration there to twenty days.” Just what was meant
by unruliness? Here’s what happened to Kozyrev. (The descrip-
tions of the punishment cell and much else in the prison regimen
tally to such an extent among all sources that the stamp of a
single system of administrative rules can be detected.) He was
given another five days in the punishment cell for pacing back
and forth. In the autumn, the building containing the punishment
cells was unheated, and it was very cold. They forced prisoners

482 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

to undress down to their underwear and to take off their shoes.
The floor was bare earth and dust (it might be wet dirt; and in
the Kazan Prison it might even be covered with water). Kozyrev
had a stool in his. (Ginzburg had none in hers.) He immediately
concluded that he would perish, that he would freeze to death.
But some kind of mysterious inner warmth gradually made itself
felt, and it was his salvation. He learned to sleep sitting on his
stool. They gave him a mug of hot water three times a day; it
made him drunk. One of the duty officers, in violation of the
rules, pressed a piece of sugar into his ten-and-a-half-ounce
bread ration. On the basis of the rations issued him, and by
observing the light from some faraway, tiny, labyrinthine window,
Kozyrev kept count of the days. His five days had come to an
end, but he had not been released. His sense of hearing had be-
come extremely acute and he heard whispers in the corridor—
having to do with either “the sixth” or “six days.” This was a
provocation: they were waiting for him to say that his five days
were over and that it was time to let him out. That would have
constituted unruliness, for which his stay in the punishment cell
would have been prolonged. But he sat silent and obedient for
another day, and then they let him out, just as if everything had
been the way it was supposed to be. (Perhaps the chief of the
prison used this method for testing all the prisoners in turn for
submissiveness? And then he could sentence all those who
weren’t yet submissive enough to further terms in the punishment
cell.) After the punishment cell the ordinary cell seemed like a
palace. Kozyrev became deaf for half a year, and he began to
get abscesses in his throat. His cellmate went insane from frequent
imprisonment in the punishment cell, and Kozyrev was kept
locked up with an insane man for more than a year, with just
the two of them there. (Nadezhda Surovtseva recalls many cases
of insanity in political isolators—she herself recalls as many as
Novorussky totaled up in the whole chronicle of Schlüsselburg. )

Does it not at this point seem to the reader that we have
gradually, step by step, mounted to the very point, the peak, of
the second horn—and that it is probably really higher than the
first? And probably sharper too?

But opinions are divided. With one voice the old camp veterans
consider the Vladimir TON of the fifties a resort. That is how

Tyurzak | 483

Vladimir Borisovich Zeldovich, sent there from Abez Station,
regarded it, and Anna Petrovna Skripnikova, who was sent there
in 1956 from the Kemerovo camps. Skripnikova was particularly
astonished at the regular dispatch, every ten days, of petitions
and declarations (she even began to write, believe it or not, to
the United Nations) and by the excellent library, including books
in foreign languages: they used to bring the complete catalogue
to the cell and you made out a list for a whole year ahead.

It is also necessary to keep in mind how elastic our law is:
thousands of women (“wives”) were sentenced to prison, to
tyurzak. And then one fine day someone whistled—and they were
transferred to camps. (The Kolyma hadn’t fulfilled the gold
plan.) And so they switched them, without any trial or any
court.

In fact, does tyurzak actually exist at all, or is it only the
vestibule for the camps?

And only here, right here, is where our chapter ought to have
begun. It ought to have examined that glimmering light which, in
time, the soul of the lonely prisoner begins to emit, like the halo
of a saint. Torn from the hustle-bustle of everyday life in so
absolute a degree that even counting the passing minutes puts
him intimately in touch with the Universe, the lonely prisoner has
to have been purged of every imperfection, of everything that has
stirred and troubled him in his former life, that has prevented
his muddied waters from settling into transparency. How grate-
fully his fingers reach out to feel and crumble the lumps of earth
in the vegetable garden (but, alas, it is all asphalt). How his
head rises of itself toward the Eternal Heavens (but, alas, this
is forbidden). And how much touching attention the little bird
on the window sill arouses in him (but, alas, there is that “muzzle”
there, and the netting as well, and the hinged ventilation pane is
locked). And what clear thoughts, what sometimes surprising
conclusions, he writes down on the paper issued him (but, alas,
only if you buy it in the commissary, and only if you turn it in to
the prison office when you have used it up—tor eternal safe-
keeping ...).

484 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

But our peevish qualifications somehow interrupt our line of
thought. The plan of our chapter creaks and cracks, and we no
longer know the answer to the question: Is the soul of a person
in the New Type Prison, in the Special Purpose Prison (the
TON), purified or does it perish once and for all?

If the first thing you see each and every morning is the eyes
of your cellmate who has gone insane, how then shall you
save yourself during the coming day? Nikolai Aleksandrovich
Kozyrev, whose brilliant career in astronomy was interrupted by
his arrest, saved himself only by thinking of the eternal and in-
finite: of the order of the Universe—and of its Supreme Spirit;
of the stars; of their internal state; and what Time and the pass-
ing of Time really are.

And in this way he began to discover a new field in physics.
And only in this way did he succeed in surviving in the Dmi-
trovsk Prison. But his line of mental exploration was blocked by
forgotten figures. He could not build any further—he had to have
a lot of figures. Now just where could he get them in his solitary-
confinement cell with its overnight kerosene lamp, a cell into
which not even a little bird could enter? And the scientist prayed:
“Please, God! I have done everything I could. Please help me!
Please help me continue!”

At this time he was entitled to receive one book every ten
days (by then he was alone in the cell). In the meager prison
library were several different editions of Demyan Bedny’s Red
Concert, which kept coming around to each cell again and
again. Half an hour passed after his prayer; they came to ex-
change his book; and as usual, without asking anything at all,
they pushed a book at him. It was entitled A Course in Astro-
physics! Where had it come from? He simply could not imagine
such a book in the prison library. Aware of the brief duration of
this coincidence, Kozyrev threw himself on it and began to mem-
orize everything he needed immediately, and everything he
might need later on. In all, just two days had passed, and he had
eight days left in which to keep his book, when there was an
unscheduled inspection by the chief of the prison. His eagle eye
noticed immediately. “But you are an astronomer?” “Yes.” “Take
this book away from him!” But its mystical arrival had opened the
way for his further work, which he then continued in the camp
in Norilsk.

Tyurzak | 485

And so now we should begin the chapter on the conflict be-
tween the soul and the bars.

But what is this? The jailer’s key is rattling brazenly in the lock.
The gloomy block superintendent is there with a long list. “Last
name, first name, patronymic? Date of birth? Article of the
Code? Term? End of term? Get your things together. Be quick
about it!”

Well, brothers, a prisoner transport! A prisoner transport!
We're off to somewhere! Good Lord, bless us! Shall we gather up
our bones?

Well, here’s what: If we are still alive, then we'll finish this
story another time. In Part IV. If we are still alive...

END OF PART I

A i
ae : i 3 2
. n

PART II

Perpetual Motion

And then we see it in the wheels,
the wheels!
Which never like to rest,
the wheels! ...
How heavy are the stones themselves,
the millstones!
They dance in merry ranks...
the millstones!

W. MULLER

A

+ wed

‘Se

inder

Aleksandr Shtrob

ich Pokrovsky

iktor Petrov

V

Aleksandr Andreyevich Svechin

ichkov

h An

Vasily Ivanovic

hkova

IC

Yelizaveta Yevgenyevna An

ich Reformatsky

il Aleksandrov

Mikha

Chapter |

The Ships
of the Archipelago

Scattered from the Bering Strait almost to the Bosporus are
thousands of islands of the spellbound Archipelago. They are
invisible, but they exist. And the invisible slaves of the Archipel-
ago, who have substance, weight, and volume, have to be trans-
ported from island to island just as invisibly and uninterruptedly.

And by what means are they to be transported? On what?

Great ports exist for this purpose—transit prisons; and smaller
ports—camp transit points. Sealed steel ships also exist: railroad
cars especially christened zak cars (“prisoner cars”). And out
at the anchorages, they are met by similarly sealed, versatile
Black Marias rather than by sloops and cutters. The zak cars
move along on regular schedules. And, whenever necessary,
whole caravans—trains of red cattle cars—are sent from port to
port along the routes of the Archipelago.

All this is a thoroughly developed system! It was created over
dozens of years—not hastily. Well-fed, uniformed, unhurried
people created it. The Kineshma convoy waits at the Moscow
Northern Station at 1700 hours on odd-numbered days to accept
Black Marias from the Butyrki, Krasnaya Presnya, and Taganka
prisons. The Ivanovo convoy has to arrive at the station at 0600
hours on even-numbered days to receive and hold in custody
transit prisoners for Nerekhta, Bezhetsk, and Bologoye.

All this is happening right next to you, you can almost touch

489

490 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

it, but it’s invisible (and you can shut your eyes to it too). At
the big stations the loading and unloading of the dirty faces takes
place far, far from the passenger platform and is seen only by
switchmen and roadbed inspectors. At smaller stations a blind
alleyway between two warehouses is preferred, into which the
Black Marias can back so that their steps are flush with the
steps of the zak car. The convict doesn’t have time to look at the
station, to see you, or to look up and down the train. He gets
to look only at the steps. (And sometimes the lower step is waist-
high, and he hasn’t the strength to climb up on it.) And the con-
voy guards, who have blocked off the narrow crossing from the
Black Maria to the zak car, growl and snarl: “Quick, quick!
Come on, come on!” And maybe even brandish their bayonets.

And you, hurrying along the platform with your children,
your suitcases, and your string bags, are too busy to look closely:
Why is that second baggage car hitched onto the train? There
is no identification on it, and it is very much like a baggage car
—and the gratings have diagonal bars, and there is darkness
behind them. But then why are soldiers, defenders of the Father-
land, riding in it, and why, when the train stops, do two of them
march whistling along on either side and peer down under the
car?

The train starts—and a hundred crowded prisoner destinies,
tormented hearts, are borne along the same snaky rails, behind
the same smoke, past the same fields, posts, and haystacks as you,
and even a few seconds sooner than you. But outside your
window even less trace of the grief which has flashed past
is left in the air than fingers leave in water. And in the familiar
life of the train, which is always exactly the same—with its slit-
openable package of bed linen, and tea served in glasses with
metal holders—could you possibly grasp what a dark and sup-
pressed horror has been borne through the same sector of
Euclidean space just three seconds ahead of you? You are dis-
satisfied because there are four of you in your compartment and
it is crowded. And could you possibly believe—and will you
possibly believe when reading these lines—that in the same size
compartment as yours, but up ahead in that zak car, there are
fourteen people? And if there are twenty-five? And if there are
thirty?

The Ships of the Archipelago | 491

The zak car—what a foul abbreviation it is! As, for that matter,
are all the executioners’ abbreviations. They meant to indicate
that this was a railroad car for prisoners—for zaklyuchennye.
But nowhere, except in prison documents, has this term caught
on and stuck. The prisoners got used to calling this kind of rail-
road car a Stolypin car, or, more simply, just a Stolypin.

As rail travel was introduced more widely in our Fatherland,
prisoner transports changed their form. Right up to the nineties
of the last century the Siberian prisoner transports moved on
foot or by horse cart. As far back as 1896, Lenin traveled to
Siberian exile in an ordinary third-class passenger car (with
free people all around him) and shouted to the train crew that
it was intolerably crowded. The painting by Yaroshenko which
everyone knows, Life Is Everywhere, shows a fourth-class pas-
senger car re-equipped in very naive fashion for prisoner trans-
port: everything has been left just as it was, and the prisoners
are traveling just like ordinary people, except that double grat-
ings have been installed on the windows. Cars of this type were
used on Russian railroads for a very long time. And certain people
remember being transported as prisoners in just such cars in
1927, except that the men and women were separated. On the
other hand, the SR Trushin recalls that even during Tsarist times
he was transported as a prisoner in a “Stolypin” car, except that
—once again going back to legendary times—there were six
people in a compartment.

Probably this type of railroad car really was first used under
Stolypin, in other words before 1911. And in the general Cadet
revolutionary embitterment, they christened it with his name.
However, it really became the favorite means of prisoner transport
only in the twenties; and it became the universal and exclusive
means only from 1930 on, when everything in our life became
uniform. Therefore it would be more correct to call it a Stalin
car rather than a Stolypin car. But we aren’t going to argue with
the Russian language here.

The Stolypin car is an ordinary passenger car divided into
compartments, except that five of the nine compartments are
allotted to the prisoners (here, as everywhere in the Archipelago,
half of everything goes to the auxiliary personnel, the guards),
and compartments are separated from the corridor not by a solid

492 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

barrier but by a grating which leaves them open for inspection.
This grating consists of intersecting diagonal bars, like the kind
One sees in station parks. It rises the full height of the car, and
because of it there are not the usual baggage racks projecting from
the compartments over the corridor. The windows on the cor-
ridor sides are ordinary windows, but they have the same diagonal
gratings on the outside. There are no windows in the prisoners’
compartments—only tiny, barred blinds on the level of the
second sleeping shelves. That’s why the car has no exterior win-
dows and looks like a baggage car. The door into each compart-
ment is a sliding door: an iron frame with bars.

From the corridor side all this is very reminiscent of a me-
nagerie: pitiful creatures resembling human beings are huddled
there in cages, the floors and bunks surrounded on all sides by
metal grilles, looking out at you pitifully, begging for something
to eat and drink. Except that in menageries they never crowd the
wild animals in so tightly.

According to the calculations of nonprisoner engineers, six
people can sit on the bottom bunks of a Stolypin compartment,
and another three can lie on the middle ones (which are joined
in one continuous bunk, except for the space cut out beside the
door for climbing up and getting down), and two more can lie
on the baggage shelves above. Now if, in addition to these eleven,
eleven more are pushed into the compartment (the last of whom
are shoved out of the way of the door by the jailers’ boots as they
shut it), then this will constitute a normal complement for a
Stolypin prisoners’ compartment. Two huddle, half-sitting, on
each of the upper baggage shelves; another five lie on the joined
middle level (and they are the lucky ones—these places are won
in battle, and if there are any prisoners present from the under-
world companionship of thieves—the blatnye—then it is they
who are lying there); and this leaves thirteen down below: five
sit on each of the bunks and three are in the aisle between their
legs. Somewhere, mixed up with the people, on the people and
under the people, are their belongings. And that is how they sit,
their crossed legs wedged beneath them, day after day.

No, it isn’t done especially to torture people. A sentenced
prisoner is a laboring soldier of socialism, so why should he be
tortured? They need him for construction work. But, after all,

The Ships of the Archipelago | 493

you will agree he is not off on a jaunt to visit his mother-in-law,
and there is no reason in the world to treat him so well that people
out in freedom would envy him. We have problems with our
transportation: he'll get there all right, and he won’t die on the
way either.

Since the fifties, when railroad timetables were actually
straightened out, the prisoners haven’t had to travel in this fashion
for very long at a time—say, a day and a half or two days. During
and after the war, things were worse. From Petropavlovsk (in
Kazakhstan) to Karaganda, a Stolypin car might be seven days
en route (with twenty-five people in a compartment). From
Karaganda to Sverdlovsk it could be eight days (with up to twenty-
six in a compartment). Even just going from Kuibyshev to Chel-
yabinsk in August, 1945, Susi traveled in a Stolypin car for
several days, and their compartment held thirty-five people lying
on top of one another, floundering, fighting.* And in the autumn
of 1946 N. V. Timofeyev-Ressovsky traveled from Petropavlovsk
to Moscow in a compartment that had thirty-six people in it! For
several days he hung suspended between other human beings and
his legs did not touch the floor. Then they started to die off—
and the guards hauled the corpses out from under their feet.
(Not right away, true; only on the second day.) That way things
became less crowded. The whole trip to Moscow continued in this
fashion for three weeks.”

Was thirty-six the upper limit for a Stolypin compartment? I
have no evidence available on thirty-seven or higher, and yet,
adhering to our one-and-only scientific method, and remembering
the necessity to struggle against “the limiters,” we are compelled
to reply: No, no, no! It is not a limit! Perhaps in some other
country it would be an upper limit, but not here! As long as there
are any cubic centimeters of unbreathed air left in the compart-
ment, even if it be beneath the upper shelves, even if between
shoulders, legs, and heads, the compartment is ready to take ad-
ditional prisoners. One might, however, conditionally accept

1. Does this perhaps satisfy those who are astonished and reproachful be-
cause people didn’t fight?

2. When he got to Moscow, a miracle took place in accordance with the
laws of the country of miracles. Officers carried Timofeyev-Ressovsky from
the prisoner transport in their arms, and he was driven away in an ordinary
automobile: he was off to advance science!

494 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

as the upper limit the number of unremoved corpses which can
be contained in the total volume of the compartment, given the
possibility of packing them in at leisure.

V. A. Korneyeva traveled from Moscow in a compartment that
held thirty women—most of them withered old women, exiled for
their religious beliefs (on arrival all these women, except two,
were immediately put in the hospital). Nobody died in the com-
partment because several of the prisoners were young, well-devel-
oped, good-looking girls, arrested “for going out with foreigners.”
These girls took it upon themselves to shame the convoy: “You
ought to be ashamed to transport them this way! These are your
own mothers!” It probably wasn’t so much their moral argument
as their attractive appearance which produced a reaction in the
convoy guards, and they did move several of the old women out
—to the punishment cell. But the punishment cell in a Stolypin
car is no punishment; it is a blessing. Of five prisoner compart-
ments, four are used as general cells, and the fifth is set aside and
divided in two halves—two narrow half-compartments with one
lower and one upper berth, like those the conductors have. These
punishment cells serve to isolate prisoners; three or four travel
in them at a time, and this gives both comfort and space.

No, it is not intentionally to torture them with thirst that the
exhausted and overcrowded prisoners are fed not soup but salt
herring or dry smoked Caspian carp for the whole of their trip in
the Stolypin car. (This was exactly how it was in all the years,
the thirties and the fifties, winter and summer, in Siberia and the
Ukraine, and it isn’t even necessary to cite examples.) It was not
to torture them with thirst—but just you tell me what these raga-
muffins were to be fed anyway while being moved around. They
were not supposed to get hot meals in prisoner-transport railroad
cars. (True, there was a kitchen in one of the Stolypin car com-
partments, but that was only for the convoy.) You couldn’t just
give the prisoners raw grits, and you couldn’t give them raw cod-
fish either, nor could you give them canned meat because they
might stuff themselves. Herring was just the thing, with a piece of
bread—and what else did they need?

Go ahead, take your half a herring while they are handing it
out, and be glad you got it. If you’re smart, you aren’t going
to eat that herring; just be patient, wait, hide it in your pocket,

The Ships of the Archipelago | 495

and you can eat it at the next transit point where there is water to
be had. It’s worse when they issue you wet Sea of Azov anchovies,
covered with coarse salt. You can’t keep them in your pocket; so
scoop them up in the flaps of your pea jacket, or in your handker-
chief, in the palm of your hand—and eat them. They divide up
these Azov anchovies on somebody’s pea jacket, whereas the
convoy guards dump the dried carp right on the floor of the com-
partment, and it is divided up on the benches, on the prisoners’
knees.®

But once they’ve given you a fish, they aren’t going to hold
back on the bread, and maybe they'll even throw in a bit of
sugar. Things are much worse when the convoy comes over and
announces: “We aren’t going to be feeding you today; nothing
was issued for you.” And it could very well be that nothing was
actually issued: someone in one or another prison accounting
office made a mistake in the figures. And it could also be that it
was issued but that the convoy was short on rations—after all,
they aren’t exactly overfed either—and so they decided to snag
a bit of your bread for themselves; and in that case to hand over
half a herring by itself would seem suspicious.

And, of course, it is not for the purpose of intentionally tortur-
ing the prisoner that after his herring he is given neither hot water
(and he never gets that here in any case) nor even plain, unboiled
water. One has to understand the situation: The convoy staff is
limited; some of them have to be on watch in the corridor; some
are on duty on the platform; at the stations they clamber all over
the car, under it, on top of it, to make sure that there aren’t any
holes in it. Others are kept busy cleaning guns, and then, of course,
there has to be time for political indoctrination and their cate-
chism on the articles of war. And the third shift is sleeping. They
insist on their full eight hours—for, after all, the war is over.
And then, to go carry water in pails—it has to be hauled a long

3. P. F. Yakubovich (V Mire Otverzhennykh [In the World of the Outcasts],
Vol. 1, Moscow, 1964), writing about the nineties of the last century, recounts
that in those terrible years they gave out ten-kopecks-a-day mess money per
person in Siberian prisoner transports, when the price of a loaf of wheat bread
(weighing ten and a half ounces?) was five kopecks; a pot of milk (two
quarts?) three kopecks. “The prisoners were simply in clover,” he writes. But
then in Irkutsk Province the prices were higher. A pound of meat cost ten
kopecks there and the “prisoners were simply famished!” One pound of meat
per day per person—it’s not half a herring, is it?

496 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

way, too, and it’s insulting: why should a Soviet soldier have to
carry water like a donkey for enemies of the people? And there
are also times when they spend half a day hauling the Stolypin
cars way out from the station in order to reshuffle or recouple
the cars (it will be farther away from prying eyes), and the result
is that you can’t get water even for your own Red Army mess.
True, there is one way out. You can go dip up some water from
the locomotive tender. It’s yellow and murky, with some lubricat-
ing grease mixed in with it. But the zeks will drink it willingly.
It doesn’t really matter that much anyway, since it isn’t as if they
could see what they are drinking in the semidarkness of their
compartment. They don’t have their own window, and there isn’t
any light bulb there either, and what light they get comes from the
corridor. And there’s another thing too: it takes a long time to
dole out that water. The zeks don’t have their own mugs. Who-
ever did have one has had it taken away from him—so what it
adds up to is that they have to be given the two government issue
mugs to drink out of, and while they are drinking up you have to
keep standing there and standing, and dipping it out and dipping
it out some more and handing it to them. (Yes, and then, too, the
prisoners argue about who’s to drink first; they want the healthy
prisoners to drink first, and only then those with tuberculosis, and
last of all those with syphilis! Just as if it wasn’t going to begin
all over again in the next cell: first the healthy ones. . .)

But the convoy could have borne with all that, hauled the
water, and doled it out, if only those pigs, after slurping up the
water, didn’t ask to go to the toilet. So here’s the way it all works
out: if you don’t give them water for a day, then they don’t ask
to go to the toilet. Give them water once, and they go to the toilet
once; take pity on them and give them water twice—and they
go to the toilet twice. So it’s pure and simple common sense: just
don’t give them anything to drink.

And it isn’t that one is stingy about taking them to the toilet
because one wants to be stingy about the use of the toilet itself,
but because taking prisoners to the toilet is a responsible—even,
one might say, a combat—operation: it takes a long, long time
for one private first class and two privates. Two guards have to
be stationed, one next to the toilet door, the other in the corridor
on the opposite side (so that no one tries to escape in that direc-

The Ships of the Archipelago | 497

tion), while the private first class has to push open and then shut
the door to the compartment, first to admit the returning prisoner,
and then to allow the next one out. The statutes permit letting
out only one at a time, so that they don’t try to escape and so that
they can’t start a rebellion. Therefore, the way it works out is
that the one prisoner who has been let out to go to the toilet is
holding up 30 others in his own compartment and 120 in the
whole car, not to mention the convoy detail! And so the command
resounds: “Come on there, come on! Get a move on, get a move
on!” The private first class and the soldiers keep hurrying him all
the way there and back and he hurries so fast that he stumbles,
and it’s as though they think he is going to steal that shithole
from the state. (In 1949, traveling in a Stolypin car between
Moscow and Kuibyshev, the one-legged German Schultz, having
understood the Russian hurry-up by this time, jumped to the
toilet and back on his one leg while the convoy kept laughing and
ordering him to go faster. During one such trip, one of the convoy
guards pushed him when he reached the platform at the end of the
corridor, and Schultz fell down on the floor in front of the toilet.
The convoy guard went into a rage and began to beat him,
while Schultz, who couldn’t get up because of the blows raining
down on him, crawled and crept into the dirty toilet. The rest
of the convoy roared with laughter. )*

So that the prisoner shouldn’t attempt to escape during the
moment he was in the toilet, and also for a faster turnaround,
the door to the toilet was not closed, and the convoy guard, watch-
ing the process from the platform of the car, could encourage it:
“Come on, come on now! That’s plenty, that’s enough for you!”
Sometimes the orders came before you even started: “All right,
number one only!” And that meant that from the platform they’d
prevent your doing anything else. And then, of course, you
couldn’t wash your hands. There was never enough water in the
tank there, and there wasn’t enough time either. If the prisoner
even so much as touched the plunger of the washstand, the con-
voy guard would roar: “Don’t you touch that, move along.” (And
if someone happened to have soap or a towel among his belong-
ings, he wouldn’t dare take it out anyway, simply out of shame:

4. This, it seems, is what is meant by the phrase “Stalin’s cult of person-
ality”?

498 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

that would really be acting like a sucker.) The toilet was filthy.
Quicker, quicker! And tracking back the liquid mess on his shoes,
the prisoner would be shoved back into the compartment, where
he would climb up over somebody’s arms and shoulders, and then,
from the top row, his dirty shoes would dangle to the middle row
and drip.

When women were taken to the toilet, the statutes of the con-
voy service, and common sense as well, required that the toilet
door be kept open, but not every convoy insisted on this and some
allowed the door to be shut: Oh, all right, go ahead and shut it.
(Later on one of the women was sent in to wash out the toilet,
and the guard again had to stand right there beside her so that
she didn’t try to escape.)

And even at this fast tempo, visits to the toilet for 120 people
would take more than two hours—more than a quarter of the
entire shift for three convoy guards! And in spite of that, you still
couldn’t make them happy. In spite of that, some old sandpiper
or other would begin to cry half an hour later and ask to go to
the toilet, and, of course, he wouldn’t be allowed to go, and then
he would soil himself right there in the compartment, and once
again that meant trouble for the private first class: the prisoner
had to be forced to pick it up in his hands and carry it away.

So that was all there was to it: fewer trips to the toilet! And
that meant less water, and less food too—because then they
wouldn’t complain of loose bowels and stink up the air; after all,
how bad could it be? A man couldn’t even breathe.

Less water! But they had to hand out the herring anyway, just
as the regulations required! No water—that was a reasonable
measure. No herring—that was a service crime.

No one, no one at all, ever set out to torture us on purpose!
The convoy’s actions were quite reasonable! But, like the ancient
Christians, we sat there in the cage while they poured salt on our
raw and bleeding tongues.

Also the prisoner-transport convoys did not often deliberately
(though sometimes they did) mix the thieves—blatari—and non-
political offenders in with Article 58 politicals in the same com-
partment. But a particular situation existed: There were a great
many prisoners and very few railroad cars and compartments, and

The Ships of the Archipelago | 499

time was always short, and so when was there time enough to sort
them out? One of the four compartments was kept for women,
and if the prisoners in the other three were to be sorted out on one
basis or another, the most logical basis would be by destination
so that it would be easier to unload them.

After all, was it because Pontius Pilate wanted to humiliate
him that Christ was crucified between two thieves? It just hap-
pened to be crucifixion day that day—and there was only one
Golgotha, and time was short. And so he was numbered with the
transgressors.

I am afraid even to think what I would have had to suffer if I
had been in the position of a common convict. . . . The convoy
and the transport officers dealt with me and my comrades with
cautious politeness. . . . Being a political, I went to hard labor
in relative comfort—on the transports, I had quarters separate
from the criminal prisoners, and my pood—my thirty-six pounds
—of baggage was moved about on a cart....

... I left out the quotation marks around the above paragraph
to enable the reader to understand things a little better. After all,
quotation marks are always used either for irony or to set some-
thing apart. And without quotation marks the paragraph sounds
wild, does it not?

It was written by P. F. Yakubovich about the nineties of the last
century. His book was recently republished as a sermon on that
dark and dismal age. We learn from it that even on a barge the
political prisoners had special quarters and a special section set
aside for their walks on deck. (The same thing appears in Tol-
stoi’s Resurrection, in which, furthermore, an outsider, Prince
Nekhlyudov, is allowed to visit the political prisoners in order to
interview them.) And it was only because the “magic word ‘politi-
cal’ had been left out by mistake” opposite Yakubovich’s name
on the list (his own words) that he was met at Ust-Kara “by the
hard-labor inspector . . . like an ordinary criminal prisoner—
rudely, provocatively, impudently.” However, this misunderstand-
ing was all happily cleared up.

What an unbelievable time! It was almost a crime to mix politi-

500 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

cals with criminals! Criminals were teamed up and driven along
the streets to the station so as to expose them to public disgrace.
And politicals could go there in carriages. (Olminsky, in 1899.)
Politicals were not fed from the common pot but were given a
food allowance instead and had their meals brought from public
eating houses. The Bolshevik Olminsky didn’t want even the
hospital rations because he found the food too coarse.° The Bu-
tyrki Prison superintendent apologized to Olminsky for the jailer’s
having addressed him too familiarly: You see, we seldom get
politicals here, and the jailer didn’t know any better!

Seldom get politicals in the Butyrki? What kind of dream is
this? Then where were they? The Lubyanka didn’t exist as a
prison at the time, and neither did Lefortovo!

The writer Radishchev was taken to the prisoner transport in
shackles, and when the weather got cold they threw over him a
“repulsive, raw sheepskin coat,” which they had taken from a
watchman. However, the Empress Catherine immediately issued
orders that his shackles be removed and that he be provided with
everything he required for his journey. But in November, 1927,
Anna Skripnikova was sent on a transport from the Butyrki to the
Solovetsky Islands in a straw hat and a summer dress. (That was
what she had been wearing when she was arrested in the summer,
and since that time her room had been sealed and no one was
willing to give her permission to get her winter things out of it.)

To draw a distinction between political prisoners and common
criminals is the equivalent of showing them respect as equal op-
ponents, of recognizing that people may have views of their own.
Thus a political prisoner is conscious of political freedom even
when under arrest. |

But since the time when we all became KR’s and the socialists
failed to retain their status as politicals, since then any protest
that as a political you ought not to be mixed up with ordinary
criminals has resulted only in laughter on the prisoners’ part and
bewilderment on the part of the jailers. “All are criminals here,”
the jailers reply—sincerely.

This mingling, this first devastating encounter, takes place
either in the Black Maria or in the Stolypin car. Up to this

5. Because of all of this the ordinary criminal mob christened the profes-
sional revolutionaries “mangy swells.” (P. F. Yakubovich.)

The Ships of the Archipelago | 501

moment, no matter how they have oppressed, tortured, and tor-
mented you during the interrogation, it has all originated with the
bluecaps, and you have never confused them with human beings
but have seen in them merely an insolent branch of the service.
But at the same time, even if your cellmates have been totally
different from you in development and experience, and even if
you have quarreled with them, and even if they have squealed on
you, they have all belonged to that same ordinary, sinful, every-
day humanity among which you have spent your whole life.

When you were jammed into a Stolypin compartment, you
expected that here, too, you would encounter only colleagues in
misfortune. All your enemies and oppressors remained on the
other side of the bars, and you certainly did not expect to find
them on this side. And suddenly you lift your eyes to the square
recess in the middle bunk, to that one and only heaven above
you, and up there you see three or four—oh, no, not faces! They
arent monkey muzzles either, because monkeys’ muzzles are
much, much decenter and more thoughtful! No, and they aren’t
simply hideous countenances, since there must be something
human even in them. You see cruel, loathsome snouts up there,
wearing expressions of greed and mockery. Each of them looks
at you like a spider gloating over a fly. Their web is that grating
which. imprisons you—and you have been had! They squinch
up their lips, as if they intend to bite you from one side. They hiss
when they speak, enjoying that hissing more than the vowel and
consonant sounds of speech—and the only thing about their
speech that resembles the Russian language is the endings of verbs
and nouns. It is gibberish.

Those strange gorilloids were usually dressed in sleeveless
undershirts. After all, it is stuffy in the Stolypin car. Their sinewy
purple necks, their swelling shoulder muscles, their swarthy
tattooed chests have never suffered prison emaciation. Who are
they? Where do they come from? And suddenly you see a small
cross dangling from one of those necks. Yes, a little aluminum
cross on a string. You are surprised and slightly relieved. That
means there are religious believers among them. How touching!
So nothing terrible is going to happen. But immediately this “be-
liever” belies both his cross and his faith by cursing (and they
curse partly in Russian), and he jabs two protruding fingers,

502 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

spread into the “V” of a slingshot, right in your eyes—not even
pausing to threaten you but starting to punch them out then and
there. And this gesture of theirs, which says, “PIL gouge out your
eyes, crowbait!” covers their entire philosophy and faith! If they
are capable of crushing your eyeballs like worms, what is there
on you or belonging to you that they'll spare? The little cross
dangles there and your still unsquashed eyes watch this wildest
of masquerades, and your whole system of reckoning goes awry:
Which of you is already crazy? And who is about to go insane?

In one moment, all the customs and habits of human inter-
course you have lived with all your life have broken down. In
your entire previous life, particularly before your arrest but even
to some degree afterward, even to some degree during interroga-
tion, too, you spoke words to other people and they answered you
in words. And those words produced actions. One might per-
suade, or refuse, or come to an agreement. You recall various
human relationships—a request, an order, an expression of grati-
tude. But what has overtaken you here is beyond all these words
and beyond all these relationships. An emissary of the ugly snout
descends, most often a vicious boy whose impudence and rude-
ness are thrice despicable, and this little demon unties your bag
and rifles your pockets—not tentatively, but treating them like
his very own. From that moment, nothing that belongs to you is
yours any longer. And all you yourself are is a rubber dummy
around which superfluous things are wrapped which can easily
be taken off. Nor can you explain anything in words, nor deny,
nor prohibit, nor plead with that evil little skunk or those foul
snouts up above. They are not people. This has become clear to
you in one moment. The only thing to be done with them is to
beat them, to beat them without wasting any time flapping your
tongue. Either that juvenile there or those bigger vermin up above.

But how can you hit those three up top from down below? And
- the kid there, even though he’s a stinking polecat, well, it doesn’t
seem right to hit him either. Maybe you can push him away soft
like? No, you can’t even do that, because he’ll bite your nose right
off, or else theyll break your head from above (and they have
knives, too, but they aren’t going to bother to pull them out and
soil them on you).

You look at your neighbors, your comrades: Let’s either resist

The Ships of the Archipelago | 503

or protest! But all your comrades, all your fellow Article 58’s,
who have been plundered one by one even before you got there,
sit there submissively, hunched over, and they stare right past
you, and it’s even worse when they look at you the way they
always do look at you, as though no violence were going on at
all, no plundering, as though it were a natural phenomenon, as
though it were the grass growing and the rain falling.

And the reason why, gentlemen, comrades, and brothers, is that
the proper time was allowed to slip by! You ought to have got
hold of yourselves and remembered who you were back when
Struzhinsky burned himself alive in his Vyatka cell, and even be-
fore that, when you were declared “counterrevolutionaries.”

And so you allow the thieves to take your overcoat and paw
through your jacket and snatch your twenty rubles from where
it was sewn in, and your bag has already been tossed up above
and checked out, and everything your sentimental wife collected
for your long trip after you were sentenced stays up there, and
they’ve thrown the bag back down to you with . . . your tooth-
brush.

Although not everyone submitted just like that, 99 percent did
in the thirties and forties. And how could that be? Men, officers,
soldiers, front-line soldiers!

To strike out boldly, a person has to be ready for that battle,
waiting for it, and has to understand its purpose. All these condi-
tions were absent here. A person wholly unfamiliar with the
thieves——the blatnoi—milieu didn’t anticipate this battle and,
most importantly, failed totally to understand its vital necessity.
Up to this point he had assumed (incorrectly) that his only
enemies were the bluecaps. He needed still more education to
arrive at the understanding that the tattooed chests were merely
the rear ends of the bluecaps. This was the revelation the bluecaps
never utter aloud: “You today, me tomorrow.” The new
prisoner wanted to consider himself a political—in other words,
on the side of the people—while the state was against the people.
And at that point he was unexpectedly assaulted from behind and
both sides by quick-fingered devils of some kind, and all the

6. I have heard of a few cases in which three seasoned, young, and healthy
men stood up against the thieves—not to defend justice in general, but to

protect, not those who were being plundered right next to them, but themselves
only. In other words: armed neutrality.

504 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

categories got mixed up, and clarity was shattered into fragments.
(And it would take a long time for the prisoner to put two and
two together and figure out that this horde of devils were hand
in glove with the jailers.)

To strike out boldly, a person has to feel that his rear is de-
fended, that he has support on both his flanks, that there is solid
earth beneath his feet. All these conditions were absent for the
Article 58’s. Having passed through the meat grinder of political
interrogation, the human being was physically crushed in body:
he had been starved, he hadn’t slept, he had frozen in punishment
cells, he had lain there a beaten man. But it wasn’t only his body.
His soul was crushed too. Over and over he had been told and
had had demonstrated to him that his views, and his conduct in
life, and his relationships with people had all been wrong because
they had brought him to ruin. All that was left in that scrunched-
up wad the engine room of the law had spewed out into the
prisoner transport was a greed for life, and no understanding
whatever. To crush him once and for all and to cut him off from
all others once and for all—that was the function of interrogation
under Article 58. The convicted prisoner had to learn that his
worst guilt out in freedom had been his attempt somehow to get
together or unite with others by any route but the Party organizer,
the trade-union organizer, or the administration. In prison this —
fear went so far as to become fear of all kinds of collective action:
two voices uttering the same complaint or two prisoners signing
a complaint on one piece of paper. Gun-shy now and for a good
long time to come of any and every kind of collaboration or
unification, the pseudo politicals were not prepared to unite even
against the thieves. Nor would they even think of bringing along
a weapon—a knife or a bludgeon—for the Stolypin car or the
transit prison. In the first place, why have one? And against
whom? In the second place, if you did use it, then, considering
the aggravating circumstance of your malevolent Article 58, you
might be shot when you were retried. In the third place, even
before that, your punishment for having a knife when they
searched you would be very different from the thief’s. For him to
have a knife was mere misbehavior, tradition, he didn’t know any
better. But for you to have one was “terrorism.”

Finally, many of the people imprisoned under Article 58 were

The Ships of the Archipelago | 505

peaceful people (very often elderly, too, and often ill), and they
had gotten along all their lives with words and without resorting
to fisticuffs, and they weren’t any more prepared for them now
than they had been before.

Nor had the thieves ever been put through the same kind of
interrogation. Their entire interrogation had consisted of two
sessions, an easy trial, and an easy sentence, and they wouldn't
have to serve it out. They would be released ahead of time: either
they would be amnestied or else they would simply escape.’ Even
during interrogation, no one ever deprived a thief of his legitimate
parcels—consisting of abundant packages from the loot kept by
his underworld comrades who were still on the loose. He never
grew thin, was never weak for a single day, and in transit he ate
at the expense of the innocent nonthieves, whom he called, in his
own jargon, the frayera*—“frayers,” or “innocents,” or “suckers.”
Not only did the articles of the Code dealing with thieves and
bandits not oppress the thief; he was, in fact, proud of his con-
victions under them. And he was supported in this pride by all the
chiefs in blue shoulder boards and blue piping. “Oh, that’s
nothing. Even though you’re a bandit and a murderer, you are not
a traitor of the Motherland, you are one of our own people; you
will reform.” There was no Section Eleven—for organization—
in the thieves’ articles in the Code. Organization was not for-
bidden the thieves. And why should it be? Let it help develop in
them the feelings of collectivism that people in our society need
so badly. And disarming them was just a game. They weren’t
punished for having a weapon. Their thieves’ law was respected
(“They can’t be anything but what they are”). And a new murder
in the cell would not increase a murderer’s sentence, but instead
would bring him new laurels.

And all that went very deep indeed. In works of the last cen-
tury, the lumpenproletariat was criticized for little more than a
certain lack of discipline, for fickleness of mood. And Stalin was
always partial to the thieves—after all, who robbed the banks for

7. V. I. Ivanov (now from Ukhta) got Article 162 (thievery) nine times
and Article 82 (escape) five times, for a total of thirty-seven years in prison—
and he “served out” five to six years for all of them.

8. “Frayer” is a blatnoi—underworld—word meaning nonthief—in other
words, not a Chelovek (“Human being,” with a capital letter). Well, even
more simply: the frayera were all nonthief, nonunderworld mankind.

506 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

him? Back in 1901 his comrades in the Party and in prison ac-
cused him of using common criminals against his political
enemies. From the twenties on, the obliging term “social ally”
came to be widely used. That was Makarenko’s contention too:
these could be reformed. According to Makarenko, the origin of
crime lay solely in the “counterrevolutionary underground.”
(Those were the ones who couldn’t be reformed—engineers,
priests, SR’s, Mensheviks. )

And why shouldn’t they steal, if there was no one to put a stop
to it? Three or four brazen thieves working hand in glove could
lord it over several dozen frightened and cowed pseudo politicals.

With the approval of the administration. On the basis of the
Progressive Doctrine.

But even if they didn’t drive off the thieves with their fists,
why didn’t the victims at least make complaints? After all, every
sound could be heard in the corridor, and a convoy guard was
marching slowly back and forth right out there.

Yes, that is a question! Every sound and every complaining
cry can be heard, and the convoy just keeps marching back and
forth—why doesn’t he interfere? Just a yard away from him, in
the half-dark cave of the compartment, they are plundering a
human being—why doesn’t the soldier of the government police
interfere?

For the very same reason: he, too, has been indoctrinated.

Even more than that: after many years of favoring thieves, the
convoy has itself slipped in their direction. The convoy has itself
become a thief.

From the middle of the thirties until the middle of the forties,
during that ten-year period of the thieves’ most flagrant debauches
and most intense oppression of the politicals, no one at all can
recall a case in which a convoy guard intervened in the plunder-
ing of a political in a cell, in a railroad car, or in a Black Maria.
But they will tell you of innumerable cases in which the convoy
accepted stolen goods from the thieves and, in return, bought
them vodka, snacks (sweeter than the rations, too), and smokes.
The examples are so numerous as to be typical.

The convoy sergeant, after all, hasn’t anything either: he has
his gun, his greatcoat roll, his mess tin, his soldier’s ration. It

9. A. S. Makarenko, Flagi na Bashnyakh (Flags on the Towers).

The Ships of the Archipelago | 507

would be cruel to require him to escort an enemy of the people in
an expensive overcoat or chrome-leather boots or with a swag
of luxurious city articles—and to reconcile himself to that in-
equality. Was not taking these things just one additional form of
the class struggle, after all? And what other norms were there?

In 1945-1946, when prisoners streamed in not just from any-
where but from Europe, and wore and had in their bags unheard-
of European articles, even the convoy officers could not restrain
themselves. Their service had kept them from the front, but at the
end of the war it also kept them from the harvest of booty—and,
I ask you, was that just?

And so, in these circumstances, the convoy guard systemati-
cally mixed the thieves and the politicals in each compartment of
their Stolypin, not through lack of space for them elsewhere and
not through haste, but out of greed. And the thieves did not let
them down: they stripped the beavers™? of everything, and then
those possessions migrated into the suitcases of the convoy.

But what could be done if the beavers had been loaded into the
Stolypin cars, and the train was moving, and there simply weren’t
any thieves at all—they simply hadn’t put any aboard? What if
they weren’t being shipped out on prisoner transports that day,
even from one of the stations along the way? This could and did
happen—several such cases are known.

In 1947 they were transporting from Moscow to the Vladimir
Central Prison a group of foreigners who had opulent possessions
—as could be seen the very first time their suitcases were opened.
At that point, the convoy itself began a systematic confiscation of
their belongings right there in the railroad car. So that nothing
should be missed, the prisoners were forced to undress down to
their bare skin and to sit on the floor of the car near the toilet
while their things were examined and taken away. But the convoy
guard failed to take into account that they were taking these
prisoners not to a camp but to a genuine prison. On their arrival
there, I. A. Korneyev handed in a written complaint, describing
exactly what had happened. They found the particular unit of
convoy guards and searched them. Some of the things were

10. A beaver in the blatnoi—underworld—jargon was any rich zek who
had “trash”—meaning good clothes—and “bacilli”—meaning fats, sugar, and
other goodies.

508 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

recovered and returned to their owners, who also received com-
pensation in money for those that weren’t recovered. They say
that the convoy guards got from ten to fifteen years. However,
this is something that cannot be checked, and anyway they would
have been convicted under an ordinary nonpolitical article of the
Code, and they wouldn’t have had to spend a long time in prison.
However, that was an exceptional case, and if he had managed
to restrain his greed in time, the chief of the convoy would have
realized that it was better not to get involved in it. And here is
another, less complicated case, which probably means that it
happened often. In August, 1945, in the Moscow-Novosibirsk
Stolypin car (in which A. Susi was being transported), it turned
out that there weren’t any thieves. And the trip was a long one,
and the Stolypins just crawled along at that time. Without hurry-
ing in the least, all in good time, the convoy chief declared a
search—one prisoner at a time in the corridor with his things.
Those summoned were made to undress in accordance with prison
rules, but that wasn’t why the search was being conducted, for
each prisoner who had been searched was, in fact, put right back
into his own crowded compartment, and any knife, anything for-
bidden, could simply have been passed from hand to hand. The
real purpose of the search was to examine their personal articles
—the clothes they were wearing and whatever was in their bags.
And right there, beside the bags, not in the least bored by the
whole protracted search, the chief of the convoy guard, an officer,
stood with a haughty poker face, with his assistant, a sergeant,
beside him. Sinful greed kept trying to pop out, but the officer
kept it hidden under a pretended indifference. It was the same
situation as an old rake looking over little girls but embarrassed
by the presence of outsiders—yes, and by that of the girls too—
and not knowing exactly how to proceed. How badly he needed
just a few thieves! But there were no thieves in the transport.
There were no thieves aboard, but there were individuals among
the prisoners who had already been infected by the thief-laden
atmosphere of the prison. After all, the example of thieves is
instructive and calls forth imitations: it demonstrates that there is
an easy way to live in prison. Two recent officers were in one of
the compartments—Sanin (from the navy) and Merezhkov. They
were both 58’s, but their attitudes had already changed. Sanin,

The Ships of the Archipelago | 509

with Merezhkov’s support, proclaimed himself the monitor of
the compartment and, through a convoy guard, requested a
meeting with their chief. (He had fathomed that haughtiness and
its need of a pimp!) This was unhéard of, but Sanin was sum-
moned, and they had a chat somewhere. Following Sanin’s ex-
ample, someone in the second compartment also asked for a
meeting. And that person was similarly received.

And the next morning they issued not twenty ounces of bread
—the prisoner-transport ration at the time—but no more than
nine ounces.

They gave out the ration, and a quiet murmur began. A mur-
mur, but in fear of any “collective action,” these politicals did not
speak up. In the event, only one among them loudly asked the
guard distributing the bread: “Citizen chief! How much does this
ration weigh?”

“The correct weight,” he was told.

“I demand a reweighing; otherwise I will not accept it!” the
dissatisfied prisoner declared loudly.

The whole car fell silent. Many waited before beginning to eat
their ration; expecting that theirs, too, would be reweighed. And
at that moment, in all his spotlessness, the officer appeared.
Everyone fell silent, which made his words all the weightier and
all the more irresistible. |

“Which one here spoke out against the Soviet government?”

All hearts stopped beating. (People will protest that this is a
universal approach, that even out in freedom every little chief
declares himself to be the Soviet government, and just try to argue
with him about it. But for those who are panicky, who have just
been sentenced for anti-Soviet propaganda, the threat is more
frightening. )

“Who was starting a mutiny over the bread ration?” the officer
demanded.

“Citizen lieutenant, I only wanted . . .” The guilty rebel was
already trying to explain it all away.

“Aha, you’re the bastard? You’re the one who doesn’t like the
Soviet government?”

(And why rebel? Why argue? Wasn’t it really easier to eat
that little underweight ration, to suffer it in silence? And now he
had fallen right in it!)

510 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

“You stinking shit! You counterrevolutionary! You ought to
be hanged, and you have the nerve to demand that the bread
ration be reweighed! You rat—the Soviet government gives you
food and drink, and you have the brass to be dissatisfied? Do you
know what you’re going to get for that?”

Orders to the guard: “Take him out!” The lock rattles. “Come
on out, you! Hands behind your back!” They bring out the un-
fortunate.

“Now who else is dissatisfied? Who else wants his bread ration
reweighed?”

(And it’s not as if you could prove anything anyway. It’s not
as if they'd take your word against the lieutenant’s if you were
to complain somewhere that there were only nine ounces instead
of twenty.)

It’s quite enough to show a well-beaten dog the whip. All the
rest turned out to be satisfied, and that was how the penalty
ration was confirmed for all the days of the long journey. And they
began to withhold the sugar too. The convoy had appropriated it.

(And this took place during the summer of our two great vic-
tories—over Germany and Japan—victories which embellish the
history of our Fatherland and which our grandsons and great-
grandsons will learn about in school.)

The prisoners went hungry for a day and then a second day,
by which time several of them began to get a bit wiser, and Sanin
said to his compartment: “Look, fellows: If we go on this way,
we're lost. Come on now, all of you who have some good stuff
with you, let me have it, and I'll trade it for something to eat.”
With great self-assurance he accepted some articles and turned
down others. (Not all the prisoners were willing to let their
things go—and, you see, no one forced them to either.) And then
he and Merezhkov asked to be allowed to leave the compartment,
and, strangely enough, the convoy let them out. Taking the things,
they went off toward the compartment of the convoy guard, and
they returned from there with sliced loaves of bread and with
makhorka. These very loaves constituted the eleven ounces miss-
ing from the daily rations. Now, however, they were not dis-
tributed on an equal basis but went only to those who had handed
over their belongings.

And that was quite fair: after all, they had all admitted they

The Ships of the Archipelago | 511

were satisfied with the reduced bread ration. It was also fair be-
cause the belongings were, after all, worth something, and it was
right that they should be paid for. And it was also fair in the long
view because those things were simply too good for camp and
were destined anyway to be taken away or stolen there.

The makhorka had belonged to the guard. The soldiers shared
their precious makhorka with the prisoners. And that was fair,
too, since they had eaten the prisoners’ bread and drunk up their
sugar, which was too good for enemies anyway. And, last, it was
only fair, too, that Sanin and Merezhkov took the largest share
for themselves even though they’d contributed nothing—because
without them all this would not have been arranged.

And so they sat crammed in there, in the semidarkness, and
some of them chewed on their neighbors’ chunks of bread and
their neighbors sat there and watched them. The guard permitted
smoking only on a collective basis, every two hours—and the
whole car was as filled with smoke as if there’d been a fire. Those
who at first had clung to their things now regretted that they
hadn’t given them to Sanin and asked him to take them, but
Sanin said he’d only take them later on.

This whole operation wouldn’t have worked so well and so
thoroughly had it not been for the slow trains and slow Stolypin
cars of the immediate postwar years, when they kept unhitching
them from one train and hitching them to another and held them
waiting in the stations. And, at the same time, if it hadn’t been
the immediate postwar period, neither would there have been
those greed-inspiring belongings. Their train took a week to get
to Kuibyshev—and during that entire week they got only nine
ounces of bread a day. (This, to be sure, was twice the ration
distributed during the siege of Leningrad.) And they did get dried
Caspian carp and water, in addition. They had to ransom their
remaining bread ration with their personal possessions. And soon
the supply of these articles exceeded the demand, and the convoy
guards became very choosy and reluctant to take more things.

They were received at the Kuibyshev Transit Prison, given
baths, and returned as a group to that very same Stolypin. The
convoy which took them over was new—but, in passing on the
relay baton, the previous crew had evidently told them how to
put the squeeze on, and the very same system of ransoming their

512 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

own rations functioned all the way to Novosibirsk. (It is easy to
see how this infectious experiment might have spread rapidly
through whole units of the convoy guards.)

And when they were unloaded on the ground between the
tracks in Novosibirsk, some new officer came up and asked them:
“Any complaints against the convoy?” And they were all so con-
fused that nobody answered.

The first chief of convoy had calculated accurately—this was
Russia!

Another factor which distinguishes Stolypin passengers from the
rest of the train is that they do not know where their train is going
and at what station they will disembark: after all, they don’t have
tickets, and they don’t read the route signs on the cars. In Moscow,
they sometimes load them on so far from the station platform that
even the Muscovites among them don’t know which of the eight
Moscow stations they are at. For several hours the prisoners sit
all squeezed together in the stench while they wait for a switch-
ing engine. And finally it comes and takes the zak car to the al-
ready made-up train. If it is summertime, the station loudspeakers.
can be heard: “Moscow to Ufa departing from Track 3.
Moscow to Tashkent still loading at Platform 1 .. .” That means
it’s the Kazan Station, and those who know the geography of the
Archipelago are now explaining to their comrades that Vorkuta
and Pechora are out: they leave from the Yaroslavl Station; and
the Kirov and Gorky camps” are out too. They never send people
from Moscow to Byelorussia, the Ukraine, or the Caucasus any-
way. They have no room there even for their own. Let’s listen
some more: the Ufa train has left, and ours hasn’t moved. The
Tashkent train has started, and were still here. “Moscow to
Novosibirsk departing. All those seeing passengers off, disem-
bark. . . . All passengers show their tickets. . . .” We have started.

11. Thus it is that weeds get into the harvest of fame. But are they weeds?
After all, there are no Pushkin, Gogol, or Tolstoi camps—but there are Gorky
camps, and what a nest of them too! Yes, and there is a separate mine “named
for Maxim Gorky” (twenty-five miles from Elgen in the Kolyma)! Yes, Aleksei
Maximovich Gorky ... “with your heart and your name, comrade .. .” If the

enemy does not surrender . . . You say one reckless little word, and look—
youre not in literature any longer.

The Ships of the Archipelago | 513

Our train! And what does that prove? Nothing so far. The middle
Volga area is still open, and the South Urals. And Kazakhstan
with the Dzhezkazgan copper mines. And Taishet, with its factory
for creosoting railroad ties (where, they say, creosote penetrates
the skin and bones and its vapors fill the lungs—and that is
death). All Siberia is still open to us—all the way to Sovetskaya
Gavan. The Kolyma too. And Norilsk.

And if it is wintertime, the car is battened down and the loud-
speakers are inaudible. If the convoy guards obey their regula-
tions, then you'll hear nary a whisper from them about the route
either. And thus we set out, and, entangled in other bodies, fall
asleep to the clacking of the wheels without knowing whether we
will see forest or steppe through the window tomorrow. Through
that window in the corridor. From the middle shelf, through the
grating, the corridor, the two windowpanes, and still another grat-
ing, you can still see some switching tracks and a piece of open
space hurtling by the train. If the windowpanes have not frosted
over, you can sometimes even read the names of the stations—
some Avsyunino or Undol. Where are these stations? No one in
the compartment knows. Sometimes you can judge from the sun
whether you are being taken north or east. Or at some place
called Tufanovo, they might shove some dilapidated nonpolitical
offender into your compartment, and he would tell you he was
being taken to Danilov to be tried and was scared he’d get a
couple of years. In this way you would find out that you’d gone
through Yaroslavl that night, which meant that the first transit
prison on your route would be Vologda. And some know-it-alls
in the compartment would savor gloomily the famous flourish,
stressing all the “o’s,” of the Vologda guards: “The Vologda con-
voy guards don’t joke!”

But even after figuring out the general direction, you still
haven't really found out anything: transit prisons lie in clusters
on your route, and you can be shunted off to one side or another
from any one of them. You don’t fancy Ukhta, nor Inta, nor
Vorkuta. But do you think that Construction Project 501—a
railroad in the tundra, crossing northern Siberia—is any sweeter?
It is worse than any of them.

Five years after the war, when the waves of prisoners had
finally settled within the river banks (or perhaps they had merely

514 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

expanded the MVD staffs?), the Ministry sorted out the millions
of piles of cases and started sending along with each sentenced
prisoner a sealed envelope that contained his case file and, visible
through a slot in the envelope, his route and destination, inserted
for the convoy (and the convoy wasn’t supposed to know any-
thing more than that—because the contents of the file might have
a corrupting influence). So then, if you were lying on the middle
bunk, and the sergeant stopped right next to you, and you could
read upside down, you might be fast enough to read that some-
one was being taken to Knyazh-Pogost and that you were being
sent to Kargopol.

So now there would be more worries! What was Kargopol
Camp? Who had ever heard of it? What kind of general-assign-
ment work did they have there? (There did exist general-assign-
ment work which was fatal, and some that was not that bad.)
Was this a death camp or not?

And then how had you failed to let your family know in the
hurry of leaving, and they thought you were still in the Stalino-
gorsk Camp near Tula? If you were very nervous about this and
very inventive, you might succeed in solving that problem too:
you might find someone with a piece of pencil lead half an inch
long and a piece of crumpled paper. Making sure the convoy
doesn’t see you from the corridor (you are forbidden to lie with
your feet toward the corridor; your head has to be in that direc-
tion), hunched over and facing in the opposite direction, you
write to your family, between lurches of the car, that you have
suddenly been taken from where you were and are being sent
somewhere else, and you might be able to send only one letter
a year from your new destination, so let them be prepared for
this eventuality. You have to fold your letter into a triangle and
carry it to the toilet in the hope of a lucky break: they might just
take you there while approaching a station or just after passing
a station, and the convoy guard on the car platform might get
careless, and you can quickly press down on the flush pedal and,
using your body as a shield, throw the letter into the hole. It will
get wet and soiled, but it might fall right through and land be-
tween the rails. Or it might even get through dry, and the draft
beneath the car will catch and whirl it, and it will fall under the
wheels or miss them and land on the downward slope of the

The Ships of the Archipelago | 515

embankment. Perhaps it will lie there until it rains, until it snows,
until it disintegrates, but perhaps a human hand will pick it up.
And if this person isn’t a stickler for the Party line, he will make
the address legible, he will straighten out the letters, or perhaps
put it in an envelope, and perhaps the letter will even reach its
destination. Sometimes such letters do arrive—postage due, half-
blurred, washed out, crumpled, but carrying a clearly defined
splash of grief.

But it is better still to stop as soon as possible being a sucker—
that ridiculous greenhorn, that prey, that victim. The chances
are ninety-five out of a hundred that your letter won’t get there.
But even if it does, it will bring no happiness to your home. And
you won’t be measuring your life and breath by hours and days
once you have entered this epic country: arrivals and departures
here are separated by decades, by a quarter-century. You will
never return to your former world. And the sooner you get used
to being without your near and dear ones, and the sooner they
get used to being without you, the better it will be. And the
easier!

And keep as few things as possible, so that you don’t have to
fear for them. Don’t take a suitcase for the convoy guard to crush
at the door of the car (when there are twenty-five people in a
compartment, what else could he figure out to do with it?). And
don’t wear new boots, and don’t wear fashionable oxfords, and
don’t wear a woolen suit: these things are going to be stolen, taken
away, swept aside, or switched, either in the Stolypin car, or in
the Black Maria, or in the transit prison. Give them up without
a struggle—because otherwise the humiliation will poison your
heart. They will take them away from you in a fight, and trying
to hold onto your property will only leave you with a bloodied
mouth. All those brazen snouts, those jeering manners, those two-
legged dregs, are repulsive to you. But by owning things and
trembling about their fate aren’t you forfeiting the rare oppor-
tunity of observing and understanding? And do you think that the
freebooters, the pirates, the great privateers, painted in such lively
colors by Kipling and Gumilyev, were not simply these same

516 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

blatnye, these same thieves? That’s just what they were. Fascinat-
ing in romantic literary portraits, why are they so repulsive to
you here?

Understand them too! To them prison is their native home. No
matter how fondly the government treats them, no matter how it
softens their punishments, no matter how often it amnesties them,
their inner destiny brings them back again and again. Was not
the first word in the legislation of the Archipelago for them? In
our country, the right to own private property was at one time
just as effectively banished out in freedom too. (And then those
who had banished it began to enjoy possessing things.) So why
should it be tolerated in prison? You were too slow about it; you
didn’t eat up your fat bacon; you didn’t share your sugar and
tobacco with your friends. And so now the thieves empty your
bindle in order to correct your moral error. Having given you
their pitiful worn-out boots in exchange for your fashionable
ones, their soiled coveralls in return for your sweater, they won’t
keep these things for long: your boots were merely something to
lose and win back five times at cards, and they'll hawk your
sweater the very next day for a liter of vodka and a round of
salami. They, too, will have nothing left of them in one day’s time
—just like you. This is the principle of the second law of thermo-
dynamics: all differences tend to level out, to disappear. . . .

Own nothing! Possess nothing! Buddha and Christ taught us
this, and the Stoics and the Cynics. Greedy though we are, why
can’t we seem to grasp that simple teaching? Can’t we under-
stand that with property we destroy our soul?

So let the herring keep warm in your pocket until you get to
the transit prison rather than beg for something to drink here.
And did they give us a two-day supply of bread and sugar? In
that case, eat it in one sitting. Then no one will steal it from you,
and you won’t have to worry about it. And you'll be free as a
bird in heaven!

Own only what you can always carry with you: know lan-
guages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your
travel bag. Use your memory! Use your memory! It is those
bitter seeds alone which might sprout and grow someday.

Look around you—there are people around you. Maybe you
will remember one of them all your life and later eat your heart

The Ships of the Archipelago | 517

out because you didn’t make use of the opportunity to ask him
questions. And the less you talk, the more you'll hear. Thin
strands of human lives stretch from island to island of the Archi-
pelago. They intertwine, touch one another for one night only
in just such a clickety-clacking half-dark car as this and then
separate once and for all. Put your ear to their quiet humming
and the steady clickety-clack beneath the car. After all, it is the
spinning wheel of life that is clicking and clacking away there.

What strange stories you can hear! What things you will laugh
at.

Now that fast-moving little Frenchman over there near the
grating—why does he keep twisting around, what is he so sur-
prised at? Explain things to him! And you can ask him at the
same time how he happened to land here. So you’ve found some-
one who knows French, and you learn that he is Max Santerre, a
French soldier. And he used to be just as alert and curious out
in freedom, in his douce France. They told him politely to stop
hanging around the transit point for Russian repatriates, but he
kept doing it anyway. And then the Russians invited him to have
a drink with them, and from a certain moment after that he
remembers nothing. He came to on the floor of an airplane to
find himself dressed in a Red Army man’s field shirt and britches,
with the boots of a convoy guard looming over him. They told
him he was sentenced to ten years in camp, but that, of course, as
he very clearly understood, was just a nasty joke, wasn’t it, and
everything would be cleared up? Oh, yes, it will be cleared up,
dear fellow; just wait.’* Well, there was nothing to be surprised at
in such cases in 1945-1946.

That particular story was Franco-Russian, and here is one
which is Russo-French. But no, really just pure Russian, be-
cause no one but a Russian would play this kind of trick! Through-
out our history there have been people who just couldn’t be con-
tained, like Menshikov in Berezovo in Surikov’s painting. Now
take Ivan Koverchenko, average height, wiry, and yet he couldn’t
be contained either. Because he was a stalwart fellow with a
healthy countenance—but the devil threw in a bit of vodka for
good measure. He would talk about himself quite willingly and

12. Ahead of him lay another sentence—for twenty-five years—that he was
given in camp, and he would not get out of Ozerlag until 1957.

518 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

laugh at himself too. Such stories as his are a treasure. They are
meant to be heard. True, it took a long time to figure out why he
had been arrested and why he was considered a political. But
there’s no real need to make a fetish of the category “political”
either. Does it matter a damn what rake they haul you in with?

As everyone knows very well, the Germans were preparing
for chemical warfare and we weren’t. Therefore, it was most un-
fortunate that because of some dunderheads in the quartermas-
ter’s department we left whole stacks of mustard-gas bombs at
a certain airdrome when we fled the Kuban—and the Germans
could have turned this fact into an international scandal. At
that point, Senior Lieutenant Koverchenko, a native of Krasnodar,
was assigned twenty parachutists and dropped behind the German
lines to bury all those invidious bombs. (Those hearing this
story have already guessed how it ends and are yawning: next
he was taken prisoner, and he has now become a traitor of the
Motherland. Nothing at all like that!) Koverchenko carried out
his assignment brilliantly and returned through the front with
his entire complement of men, having lost not one, and was
nominated to receive the order of Hero of the Soviet Union.

But it takes a month or two for the official nomination to be
confirmed—and what if you can’t be contained within that Hero
of the Soviet Union either? “Heroes” are awarded to quiet boys
who are models of military and political preparedness—but what
if your soul is afire and you want a drink, and there isn’t anything
to drink? And why, if you’re a Hero of the whole Union, are
the rats being so stingy as to refuse you an extra liter of vodka?
And Ivan Koverchenko mounted his horse and, even though it’s
true that he had never heard of Caligula, he rode his horse up-
stairs to the second floor to see the city’s military commissar—
the commandant: Come on now, issue me some vodka. (He
figured this would be more imposing, more in the style of a
Hero, and harder to turn down.) Did they arrest him for that?
No, of course not! But his award was reduced from Hero to the
Order of the Red Banner.

Koverchenko had a large thirst, and vodka wasn’t always
available, and so he had to be inventive. In Poland, he had gone
in and prevented the Germans from blowing up a certain bridge
—and he got the feeling this bridge really belonged to him and
so, for the time being, before our commandant’s headquarters

The Ships of the Archipelago | 519

arrived, he exacted payment from the Poles for crossing the
bridge. After all, without me you wouldn’t have this bridge, you
pests! He collected tolls for a whole day (for vodka), and then
got bored with it, and this wasn’t in any case the place for him to
stick around. So Captain Koverchenko offered the nearby Poles
his equitable solution: that they buy the bridge from him. (Was
he arrested for this! Nooo!) He didn’t ask very much for it, but
the Poles protested and refused. Pan Captain abandoned the
bridge: All right then, to hell with you, take your bridge and
cross it for nothing.

In 1949 he was chief of staff of a parachute regiment in Po-
lotsk. Major Koverchenko was very much disliked by the Political
Branch of the division because he had failed the political indoc-
trination course. He had once asked them to recommend him for
admission to the Military Academy, but when they gave him the
recommendation, he took one look at it and threw it back across
the table at them: “With that kind of recommendation the place
for me to go is not the Academy but to the Banderovtsy [the
Ukrainian nationalist rebels].” (Was he arrested for that? He
might very well have gotten a tenner for it, but he got away with
it.) At that point, on top of all the rest, it turned out that he had
given one of his men an unwarranted leave. And then he himself
drove a truck at breakneck speed while drunk and wrecked it.
And so they gave him ten—ten days in the guardhouse. How-
ever, his own men, who loved him with absolute devotion, were
the guards, and they let him out of the guardhouse to go and have
fun in the village. So he could have been patient through that
guardhouse stretch too. But the Political Branch began to threaten
him with a trial! Now that threat shocked and insulted Kover-
chenko; it meant: for burying bombs—lIvan, we need you; but for
a lousy one-and-a-half-ton truck—off to prison with you? He
crawled out the window at night, went over to the Dvina River,
where a friend’s motorboat was hidden, and off he went in it.

And it turned out that he wasn’t just one more drunk with a
short memory: he wanted to avenge himself for everything the
Political Branch had done to him; and in Lithuania he left his
boat and went to the Lithuanians, saying: “Brothers, take me to
your partisans! Accept me and you won't be sorry; we'll twist
their tails.” But the Lithuanians decided he was being planted on
them.

520 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

Ivan had a letter of credit sewn in his clothes. He got a ticket
to the Kuban. However, en route to Moscow he got very drunk
in a restaurant. Consequently, he squinched up his eyes at Moscow
as they were leaving the station, and told the taxi driver: “Take
me to an embassy!” “Which one?” “Who the hell cares? Any
one.” And the driver took him to one: “Which one is that?” “The
French.” “All right.”

Perhaps his thoughts got mixed up, and his original intentions
in going to an embassy had changed into something else, but his
cleverness and his strength had in no wise lapsed: without alerting
the policemen at the embassy entrance, he went quietly down a
side street and climbed to the top of a smooth wall double a man’s
height. In the embassy yard it was easier: no one discovered him
or detained him, and he went on inside, walked through one
room, then another, and he saw a table set. There were many
things on the table, but what astonished him most was the pears.
He felt a yen for them, and he stuffed all the pockets in his field
jacket and trousers with them. At that moment, the members of
the household came in to dine. Koverchenko began to attack
them and shout at them before they could begin on him: “You
Frenchmen!” According to him, France hadn’t done anything
good for the last century. “Why don’t you start a revolution?
Why are you trying to get de Gaulle into power? And you want
us to send our Kuban wheat to you? It’s no go.” “Who are you?
Where did you come from?” The French were astounded. Im-
mediately adopting the right approach, Koverchenko kept his wits
about him: “A major of the MGB.” The French were frightened.
“But even so, you are not supposed to burst in here. What is your
business here?” “ you in the mouth!” Koverchenko bel-
lowed at them straight from the heart. And, after playing the
hoodlum for them a while longer, he noticed that in the next room
they were already telephoning about him. He was still sober
enough to begin his retreat, but the pears started to fall out of
his pockets—and he was pursued by mocking laughter.

And in actual fact, he had enough strength left not only to
leave the embassy safe and sound but to move on. The next morn-
ing he woke up in Kiev Station (was he not planning to go on to
the West Ukraine?), and they soon picked him up there.

During his interrogation he was beaten by Abakumov person-
ally. And the scars on his back swelled up to a hand’s breadth.

The Ships of the Archipelago | 521

The Minister beat him, of course, not because of the pears and
not because of his valid rebuke to the French, but to find out by
whom and when he had been recruited. And, of course, the
prison term they handed him was twenty-five years.

There are many such stories, but like every railroad car, the
Stolypin falls silent at night. At night there won’t be any fish, nor
water, nor going to the toilet.

And the car is filled then with the steady noise of the wheels,
which doesn’t in the least break the silence. And if, in addition,
the convoy guard has left the corridor, one can talk quietly from
the third compartment for men with the fourth, or women’s, com-
partment.

A conversation with a woman in prison is quite special. There
is something noble about it, even if one talks only about articles
of the Code and prison terms.

One such conversation went on all night long, and here are
the circumstances in which it took place. It was in July, 1950.
There were no passengers in the women’s compartment except for
one young girl, the daughter of a Moscow doctor, sentenced under
Article 58-10. And there was a big to-do in the men’s compart-
ment. The convoy guards began to drive all the zeks out of three
compartments into two (and don’t even ask how many they piled
up in there). And they brought in some offender who was not at
all like a convict. In the first place, he hadn’t had his head shaved
and his wavy blond locks, real curls, lay seductively on his big,
thoroughbred head. He was young, dignified, and dressed in a
British military uniform. He was escorted through the corridor
with an air of deference (the convoy itself had been a little awed
by the instructions on the envelope containing his case file).
And the girl had managed to catch a glimpse of the whole
episode. But he himself had not seen her. (And how much he
regretted that later!)

From the noise and the commotion she realized that the com-
partment next to hers had been emptied for him. It was obvious
that he was not supposed to communicate with anyone—all the
more reason for her to want to talk with him. It wasn’t possible
in a Stolypin to see from one compartment into another, but
when everything was still, you could hear between them. Late
at night, when things had begun to quiet down, the girl sat on the

522 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

edge of her bunk, right up against the grating, and called to him
quietly. (And perhaps she first sang softly. The convoy guard was
supposed to punish her for all this, but the guard itself had
settled down for the night, and there was no one in the corridor.)
The stranger heard her and, following her instructions, sat in
the same position. They were now sitting with their backs to
each other, braced against the same one-inch partition, and
speaking quietly through the grating at the outer edge of the
partition. Their heads were as close as if their lips were kissing,
but they could neither touch one another nor see each other.

Erik Arvid Andersen understood Russian tolerably well by
this time, made many mistakes when he spoke it, but, in the end,
could succeed in communicating his thoughts. He told the girl
his astonishing story (and we, too, will hear about it at the
transit prison center). She, in turn, told him the simple story
of a Moscow student who had gotten 58-10. But Arvid was
fascinated. He asked her about Soviet youth and about Soviet
life, and what he heard was not at all what he had learned
earlier in leftist Western newspapers and from his own official
visit here.

They talked all night long. And that night everything came
together for Arvid: the strange prisoners’ car in an alien country;
the rhythmic nighttime clicking of the wheels, which always
finds an echo in our hearts; and the girl’s melodic voice, her
whispers, her breath reaching his ear—his very ear, yet he
couldn’t even look at her. (And for a year and a half he hadn’t
heard a woman’s voice. )

And for the first time, through that invisible (and probably,
and, of course, necessarily beautiful) girl, he began to see the
real Russia, and the voice of Russia told him the truth all
night long. One can learn about a country for the first time this
way too. (And in the morning he would glimpse Russia’s dark
straw-thatched roofs through the window—to the sad whispering
of his hidden guide.)

Yes, indeed, all this is Russia: the prisoners on the tracks
refusing to voice their complaints, the girl on the other side of
the Stolypin partition, the convoy going off to sleep, pears
falling out of pockets, buried bombs, and a horse climbing to
the second floor.

The Ships of the Archipelago | 523

“The gendarmes! The gendarmes!” the prisoners cried out hap-
pily. They were happy that they would be escorted the rest
of the way by the attentive gendarmes and not by the convoy.

Once again I have forgotten to insert quotation marks. That
was Korolenko who was telling us this.** We, it is true, were not
happy to see the bluecaps. But anyone who ever got caught in
what the prisoners christened the pendulum would have been
glad to see even them.

An ordinary passenger might have a difficult time boarding
a train at a small way station—but not getting off. Toss your
things out and jump off. This was not the case with a prisoner,
however. If the local prison guard or police didn’t come for him
or was late by even two minutes, toot-toot, the whistle would
blow, and the train would get under way, and they would take
the poor sinner of a prisoner all the way to the next transit point.
And it was all right if it was actually a transit point that they
took you to, because they would begin to feed you again there.
But sometimes it was all the way to the end of the Stolypin’s
route, and then they would keep you for eighteen hours in an
empty car and take you back with a whole new group of
prisoners, and then once again, maybe, they wouldn’t come for
you—and once again you'd be in a blind alley, and once again
you’d wait there and during all that time they wouldn't feed you.
Your rations, after all, were issued only until your first stop,
and the accounting office isn’t to blame that the prison messed
things up, for you are, after all, listed for Tulun. And the con-
voy isn’t responsible for feeding you out of its own rations. So
they swing you back and forth six times (it has actually
happened!): Irkutsk to Krasnoyarsk, Krasnoyarsk to Irkutsk,
Irkutsk to Krasnoyarsk, etc., etc., etc., and when you do see a
blue visor on the Tulun platform, you are ready to throw your
arms around him: Thank you, beloved, for saving me.

You get so worn down, so choked, so shattered in a Stolypin,
even in two days’ time, that before you get to a big city you

13. V. G. Korolenko, Istoriya Moyego Sovremennika (A History of My
Contemporary), Moscow, 1955, Vol. III, p. 166.

524 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

yourself don’t know whether you would rather keep going in
torment just to get there sooner, or whether you’d rather be put
in a transit prison to recover a little.

But the convoy guards begin to hustle and bustle. They come
out with their overcoats on and knock their gunstocks on the
floor. That means they are going to unload the whole car.

First the convoy forms up in a circle at the car steps, and
no sooner have you dropped, fallen, tumbled down them, than
the guards shout at you deafeningly in unison from all sides
(as they have been taught): “Sit down, sit down, sit down!”
This is very effective when several voices are shouting it at once
and they don’t let you raise your eyes. It’s like being under
shellfire, and involuntarily you squirm, hurry (and where is there
for you to hurry to?), crouch close to the ground, and sit down,
having caught up with those who disembarked earlier.

“Sit down!” is a very clear command, but if you are a new
prisoner, you don’t yet understand it. When I heard this com-
mand on the switching tracks in Ivanovo, I ran, clutching my
suitcase in my arms (if a suitcase has been manufactured out in
freedom and not in camp, its handle always breaks off and al-
ways at a difficult moment), and set it down on end on the ground
and without looking around to see how the first prisoners were
sitting, sat down on the suitcase. After all, to sit down right
on the ties, on the dark oily sand, in my officer’s coat, which was
not yet so very dirty and which still had uncut flaps! The chief
of the convoy—a ruddy mug, a good Russian face—broke into a
run, and I hadn’t managed to grasp what he wanted and why
until I saw that he meant, clearly, to plant his sacred boot in
my cursed back but something restrained him. However, he
didn’t spare his polished toe and kicked the suitcase and smashed
in the top. “Sit down!” he gritted by way of explanation. Only at
that point did it dawn on me that I towered over the surround-
ing zeks, and without even having the chance to ask: “How
am I supposed to sit down?” I already understood how, and
sat down in my precious coat, like everybody else, just as dogs
sit at gates and cats at doors.

(I still have that suitcase, and even now when I chance to
come upon it, I run my fingers around the hole torn in it. It is a
wound which cannot heal as wounds heal on bodies or on hearts.
Things have longer memories than people. )

The Ships of the Archipelago | 525

And forcing prisoners to sit down was also a calculated
maneuver. If you are sitting on your rear end on the ground, so
that your knees tower in front of you, then your center of gravity
is well back of your legs, and it is difficult to get up and im-
possible to jump up. And more than that, they would make us
sit as tightly massed together as possible so that we’d be in each
other’s way. And if all of us wanted to attack the convoy to-
gether, they would have mowed us down before we got moving.

They had us sitting there to wait for the Black Maria (it trans-
ports the prisoners in batches, you couldn’t get them all in at
once), or else to be herded off on foot. They would try to sit us
down someplace hidden so that fewer free people would see us,
but at times they did make the prisoners sit right there awkwardly
on the platform or in an open square. (That is how it was in
Kuibyshev.) And it is a difficult experience for the free people:
we stare at them quite freely and openly with a totally sincere
gaze, but how are they supposed to look at us? With hatred?
Their consciences don’t permit it. (After all, only the Yermilovs
believe that people were imprisoned “for cause.”) With sym-
pathy? With pity? Be careful, someone will take down your name
and they'll set you up for a prison term too; it’s that simple. And
our proud free citizens (as in Mayakovsky: “Read it, envy me,
I am a citizen”) drop their guilty heads and try not to see us at
all, as if the place were empty. The old women are bolder than
the rest. You couldn’t turn them bad. They believe in God. And
they would break off a piece of bread from their meager loaf
and throw it to us. And old camp hands—nonpolitical offenders,
of course—weren’t afraid either. All camp veterans knew the say-
ing: “Whoever hasn’t been there yet will get there, and whoever
was there won’t forget it.” And look, they'd toss over a pack of
cigarettes, hoping that someone might do the same for them
during their next term. And the old woman’s bread wouldn’t
quite carry far enough, what with her weak arm, and it would
fall short, whereas the pack of cigarettes would arch through the
air right into our midst, and the convoy guards would im-
mediately work the bolts of their rifles—pointing them at the old
woman, at kindness, at the bread: “Come on, old woman, run
along.”

And the holy bread, broken in two, was left to lie in the dust
while we were driven off. 7

526 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

In general, those minutes of sitting on the ground there at
the station were among our very best. I remember that in Omsk
we were made to sit down on the railroad ties between two long
freight trains. No one from outside entered this alleyway. (In
all probability, they had stationed a soldier at either end: “You
can’t go in there.” And even in freedom our people are taught to
take orders from anyone in a uniform.) It began to grow dark.
It was August. The oily station gravel hadn’t yet completely
cooled off from the sun and warmed us where we sat. We couldn’t
see the station, but it was very close by, somewhere behind the
trains. A phonograph blared dance music, and the crowd buzzed
in unison. And for some reason it didn’t seem humiliating to sit
on the ground in a crowded dirty mass in some kind of pen; and
it wasn’t a mockery to hear the dances of young strangers, dances
we would never dance; to picture someone on the station platform
meeting someone or seeing someone off—maybe even with
flowers. It was twenty minutes of near-freedom: the twilight
deepened, the first stars began to shine, there were red and green
lights along the tracks, and the music kept playing. Life was
going on without us—and we didn’t even mind any more.

Cherish such moments, and prison will become easier to bear.
Otherwise you will explode from rage.

And if it was dangerous to herd the zeks along to the Black
Maria because there were streets and people right next to them,
then the convoy statutes provided another good command: “Link
arms!” There was nothing humiliating in this—link arms! Old
men and boys, girls and old women, healthy people and cripples.
If one of your hands is hanging onto your belongings, your
neighbor puts his arm under that arm and you in turn link your
other arm with your other neighbor’s. So you have now been
compressed twice as tightly as in ordinary formation, and you
have immediately become heavier and are hampered by being
thrown out of balance by your belongings and by your awkward-
ness with them, and you sway steadily as you limp. Dirty, gray,
clumsy creatures, you move ahead like blind men with an
ostensible tenderness for one another—a caricature of humanity.

It may well be that no Black Maria at all is there to fetch you.
And the chief of convoy is perhaps a coward. He is afraid he
will fail to deliver you safely—and in this state, weighed down,

The Ships of the Archipelago | 527

jouncing as you go, knocking into things, you trudge all the way
through the city to the prison itself.

There is one more command which is a caricature of geese:
“Take hold of your heels!” This meant that anyone whose hands
were free had to grab both his legs at about ankle height. And
now: “Forward march.” (Well, now, reader, put this book aside,
try going around the room that way! How does it work? And
at what speed? How much looking around could you do? And
what about escaping?) Picture the way three or four dozen such
geese look from the side. (Kiev, 1940.)

And it is not necessarily August out; it might be December,
1946, and, there being no Black Maria, you are being herded
at 40 degrees below zero to the Petropavlovsk Transit Prison.
And it is easy to guess that during the last hours before arriv-
ing the Stolypin convoy refused to go to the trouble of taking
you to the toilet, so as to avoid getting it dirty. Weakened from
interrogation, gripped by the cold, you have a very hard time
holding it—women especially. Well, and so what! It’s for horses
to stand stock-still and loose the floodgates! It’s for dogs to
go lift a leg against a fence. But as for people, you can do it
right there, while you keep moving. No need to be shy in your
own fatherland. It will dry at the transit prison. . . . Vera
Korneyeva stooped down to adjust her shoe and fell one step
behind, and the convoy immediately set the police dog on her
and the dog bit her in the buttocks through all her winter
clothing. Don’t fall behind! And an Uzbek fell down, and they
beat him with their gunstocks and jackboots.

Well, that’s no tragedy: it won’t be photographed for the
Daily Express. And the chief of convoy will live to a ripe old age
and never be tried by anyone.

And the Black Marias, too, came down to us from history. In
what respect does the prison carriage described by Balzac differ
from a Black Maria? Only that the prison carriage was drawn
along more slowly, and prisoners weren’t packed so tightly.
True, in the twenties columns of prisoners were still being
driven afoot through our cities, even Leningrad. They brought

528 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

traffic to a halt at intersections. (“So you got caught stealing?”
came the reproaches from the sidewalks. No one had yet grasped
the great plan for sewage disposal.)

But, always alert to technological trends, the Archipelago
lost no time in adopting the black ravens, more familiarly known
simply as ravens—Black Marias. These first Black Marias ap-
peared at the same time as the very first trucks on our still cob-
blestoned streets. Their suspension was poor, and it was very
rough riding in them, but then the prisoners weren’t made of
crystal either. On the other hand, they were very tightly corked
even at that time, in 1927: there wasn’t one little crack; and there
wasn't one little electric light bulb, and there wasn’t any air to
breathe, and it was impossible to see out. And even in those days
they stood so tightly packed inside that there wasn’t any room
left at all. And it wasn’t that all this was intentionally planned;
there simply weren’t enough wheels to go around.

For many years the Black Marias were steel-gray and had, so
to speak, prison written all over them. But in the biggest cities
after the war they had second thoughts and decided to paint them
bright colors and to write on the outside, “Bread” (the prisoners
were the bread of construction), or “Meat” (it would have been
more accurate to write “bones”), or even, simply, “Drink Soviet
Champagne!”

Inside, the Black Marias might consist of a simple armored
body or shell, an empty enclosure. Or perhaps there were benches
against the walls all the way around. This was in no sense a con-
venience, but the reverse: they would push in just as many
prisoners as could be inserted standing up, but in this case they
would be piled on top of each other like baggage, one bale on
another. The Black Maria might also have a box in the rear—
a narrow steel closet for one prisoner. Or it might be boxed
throughout: single closets that locked like cells along the right-
and left-hand walls, with a corridor in the middle for the turnkey.

One was hardly likely to imagine that interior like a honey-
comb when looking at that laughing maiden on the outside:
“Drink Soviet Champagne!”

They drive you into the Black Marias to the tune of the same
shouts coming from the convoy from all sides at once: “Come
on there, get a move on, quick!” And so that you shouldn’t have

The Ships of the Archipelago | 529

time to look around and figure out how to escape, you are shoved
and pushed so that you and your bag get stuck in the narrow
little door and you knock your head against the lintel. The steel
rear door slams shut with a bang—and off you go.

It was rare, of course, to spend hours in a Black Maria; twenty
to thirty minutes were more likely. But you got flung around, it
was a bone-breaker, it crushed all your insides during those half-
hours, your head stooped if you were tall, and you remembered
the cozy Stolypin with longing.

And the Black Maria means one thing further—it is a re-
shuffling of the deck, new encounters, and among them those
which stand out most clearly are, of course, your encounters with
the thieves. You may never happen to be in the same compart-
ment with them, and maybe they won’t put you in the same cell
with them even at the transit prison, but here in the Black Maria
you are in their hands.

Sometimes it is so crowded that even the thieves, the urki,
find it awkward to filch. Your legs and your arms are clamped
between your neighbors’ bodies and bags as tightly as if they were
in stocks. Only when all of you are tossed up and down and all
your insides are shaken up by ruts and bumps can you change
the position of your legs and arms.

Sometimes, in less crowded circumstances, the thieves can
check out the contents of all the bags in just half an hour and
appropriate all the “bacilli”—the fats and goodies—and the best
of the “trash”’—the clothing. Cowardly and sensible considera-
tions most likely restrain you from putting up a fight against
them. (And crumb by crumb you are already beginning to lose
your immortal soul, still supposing that the main enemies and the
main issues lie somewhere ahead and that you must save yourself
for them.) And you might just throw a punch at them once and
get a knife in the ribs then and there. (There would be no in-
vestigation, and even if there should be one, it wouldn’t threaten
the thieves in any way: they would only be delayed at the transit
prison instead of going to the far-off camp. You must concede
that in a fight between a socially friendly prisoner and a socially
hostile prisoner the state simply could not be on the side of the
latter. )

In 1946, retired Colonel Lunin, a high-ranking official in

530 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

Osoaviakhim—the Society for Assistance to Defense and to
Aviation-Chemical Construction of the U.S.S.R.—recounted in
a Butyrki cell how the thieves in a Moscow Black Maria, on
March 8, International Women’s Day, during their transit from
the City Court to Taganka Prison, gang-raped a young bride
in his presence (and amid the silent passivity of everyone else in
the van). That very morning the girl had come to her trial a free
person, as attractively dressed as she could manage (she was
on trial for leaving her work without official permission—which
in itself was a repulsive fabrication worked up by her chief in
revenge for her refusal to live with him). A half-hour before the
Black Maria, the girl had been sentenced to five years under
the decree and had then been shoved into this Black Maria, and
right there in broad daylight, somewhere on the Park Ring
(“Drink Soviet Champagne!”), had been turned into a camp
prostitute. And are we really to say that it was the thieves who
did this to her and not the jailers? And not her chief?

And thief tenderness too! Having raped her, they robbed her.
They took the fashionable shoes with which she had hoped to
charm the judges, and her blouse—which they shoved through to
the convoy guards, who stopped the van and went off to get some
vodka and handed it in so the thieves could drink at her expense
too.

And when they got to the Taganka Prison, the girl sobbed out
her complaint. And the officer listened to her, yawned, and said:
“The government can’t provide each of you with individual
transportation. We don’t have such facilities.”

Yes, the Black Marias are a “bottleneck” of the Archipelago.
If there is no possibility of separating the politicals from the
criminals in the Stolypins, then it isn’t possible to keep women
separate from men in the Black Marias. And just how could one
expect the thieves not to live it up en route from one jail to
another?

Well, and if it weren’t for the thieves, we would have to be
grateful to the Black Marias for our brief encounters with
women! Where, if not here, is one to see them, hear them, and
touch them in a prison existence?

Once in 1950 they were transporting us from the Butyrki to
the station in a not at all crowded van—fourteen people in a

The Ships of the Archipelago | 531

Black Maria with benches. Everyone sat down, and suddenly
they pushed in one more—a woman, alone. She sat down beside
the rear door, fearfully at first. After all, she was totally defense-
less against fourteen men in a dark cell. But it became clear after
a few words that all those present were comrades. Fifty-eights.

She gave us her name—Repina, a colonel’s wife, and she had
been arrested right after he had. And suddenly a silent military
man, so young and thin that it seemed he had to be a lieutenant,
said to her: “Tell me, weren’t you arrested with Antonina I.?”
“What? Are you her husband? Oleg?” “Yes!” “Lieutenant
Colonel I.? From the Frunze Academy?” “Yes!”

What a yes that was! It emerged from a trembling throat, and
in it there was more fear of finding out something bad than
there was happiness. He sat down next to her. Twilight shafts
of summer daylight, diffused through two microscopic gratings
in the two rear doors, flickered around the interior as the van
moved along and across the faces of the woman and the lieutenant
colonel. “She and I were imprisoned in the same cell for four
months while she was undergoing interrogation.” “Where is she
now?” “All that time she lived only for you! Her fears weren’t
for herself but were all for you. First that they shouldn’t arrest
you. And then later that you should get a lighter sentence.” “But
what has happened to her now?” “She blamed herself for your
arrest. Things were so hard for her!” “Where is she now?” “Just
don’t be frightened”—and Repina put her hands on his chest as
if he were her own kin. “She simply couldn’t endure the strain.
They took her away from us. She, you know, became—well, a
little confused. You understand?”

And that tiny storm boxed in sheets of steel rolled along so
peacefully in the six-lane automobile traffic, stopped at traffic
lights, and signaled for a turn.

I had met Oleg I. in the Butyrki just a few moments before—
and here is how it happened. They had herded us into the station
“box” and had brought us our things from the storage room.
They called him and me to the door at the same moment.
Through the opened door into the corridor we could see a woman
jailer rifling the contents of his suitcase, and she flung out of it
and onto the floor a golden shoulder board with the stars of a
lieutenant colonel that had survived until then all by itself, heaven

532 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

only knows how; she herself hadn’t noticed it, and she had ac-
cidentally stepped on its big stars with her foot.

She had trampled it with her shoe—exactly as in a film shot.

I said to him: “Direct your attention to that, Comrade
Lieutenant Colonel!”

And he glowered. After all, he still had his ideas about the
spotlessness of the service. -

And now here was the next thing—about his wife.

And he had had only one hour to fit all this in.

Chapter 2

The Ports
of the Archipelago

Spread out on a large table the enormous map of our Mother-
land. Indicate with fat black dots all provincial capitals, all
railroad junctions, all transfer points where the railroad line
ends in a river route, and where rivers bend and trails begin.
What is this? Has the entire map been speckled by infectious
flies? What it is, in fact, is precisely the majestic map of the
ports of the Archipelago. These are not, to be sure, the enchanted
ports to which Aleksandr Grin enticed us, where rum is drunk
in taverns and men pay court to beautiful women.

It is a rare zek who has not known from three to five transit
prisons and camps; many remember a dozen or so, and the sons
of Gulag can count up to fifty of them without the slightest dif-
ficulty. However, in memory they get all mixed up together be-
cause they are so similar: in the illiteracy of their convoys, in
their inept roll calls based on case files; the long waiting under
the beating sun or autumn drizzle; the still longer body searches
that involve undressing completely; their haircuts with unsanitary
clippers; their cold, slippery baths; their foul-smelling toilets;
their damp and moldy corridors; their perpetually crowded,
nearly always dark, wet cells; the warmth of human flesh flanking
you on the floor or on the board bunks; the bumpy ridges of bunk
heads knocked together from boards; the wet, almost liquid,
bread; the gruel cooked from what seems to be silage.

And whoever has a good sharp memory and can recollect

533

534 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

precisely what distinguishes one from another has no need to
travel about the country because he knows its geography full well
on the basis of transit prisons. Novosibirsk? I know it. I was
there. Very strong barracks there, made from thick beams.
Irkutsk? That was where the windows had been bricked over
in several stages, you could see how they had been in Tsarist
times, and each course had been laid separately, and only small
slits had been left between them. Vologda? Yes, an ancient build-
ing with towers. The toilets right on top of one another, the
wooden partitions rotten, and the ones above leaking down into
the ones underneath. Usman? Of course. A lice-ridden stinking
hole of a jail, an ancient vaulted structure. And they used to
pack it so full that whenever they took prisoners out for a
transport you couldn’t imagine where they’d put them all—a line
strung out halfway through the city.

You had better not tell such a connoisseur that you know some
city without a transit prison. He will prove to you conclusively
that there are no such cities, and he will be right. Salsk? Well,
there they keep transit prisoners in the KPZ—cells for prelim-
inary detention—along with prisoners under interrogation. And
what do you mean, no transit prison in every district center too?
In Sol-Iletsk? Of course there’s one. In Rybinsk? What about
Prison No. 2, a former monastery? It’s a quiet one, too, with
empty courtyards paved with old, mossy flagstones and clean
wooden tubs in the bath. In Chita? Prison No. 1. In Naushki?
Not a prison but a transit camp, which is the same thing. In
Torzhok? Up the hill, also in a monastery.

You must realize, dear sir, that every town has to have its
own transit prison. After all, the courts operate everywhere. And
how are prisoners to be delivered to camp? By air?

Of course, no transit prison is the equal of another. But which
is better and which worse is something that can’t be settled in an
argument. If three or four zeks get together, each of them feels
bound to praise his “own.” Let us listen for a while to such a
discussion:

“Well, even if the Ivanovo Transit Prison isn’t one of the more
famous, my friends, just ask anybody imprisoned there in the
winter of 1937-1938. The prison was unheated—and the prison-
ers not only didn’t freeze to death, but on the upper bunks they

The Ports of the Archipelago | 535

lay there undressed. And they knocked out all the windowpanes
so as not to suffocate. Instead of the twenty men Cell 21 was
supposed to contain, there were three hundred and twenty-three!
There was water underneath the bunks, and boards were laid in
the water and people lay on those boards. That was right where
the frost poured in from the broken windows. It was like Arctic
night down under the bunks. There was no light down there either
because it was cut off by the people lying on the bunks above and
standing in the aisle. It was impossible to walk through the aisle
to the latrine tank, and people crawled along the edges of the
bunks. They didn’t distribute rations to individuals but to units
of ten. If one of the ten died, the others shoved his corpse under
the bunks and kept it there until it started to stink. They got
the corpse’s ration. And all that could have been endured, but
the turnkeys seemed to have been oiled with turpentine—and
they kept driving the prisoners endlessly from cell to cell, on and
on. You’d just get yourself settled when ‘Come on, get a move
on! You’re being moved!’ And you'd have to start in again trying
to find a place! And the reason for such overcrowding was that
they hadn’t taken anyone to the bath for three months, the lice
had multiplied, and people had abscesses from the lice on their
feet and legs—and typhus too. And because of the typhus the
prison was quarantined and no prisoner transports could leave it
for four months.”

“Well, fellows, the problem there wasn’t Ivanovo, but the
year. In 1937—1938, of course, not just the zeks but the very
stones of the transit prisons were screaming in agony. Irkutsk
was no special transit prison either, but in 1938 the doctors
didn’t even dare look into the cells but would walk down the
corridor while the turnkey shouted through the door: ‘Anyone
unconscious, come out.’ ”

“In 1937, fellows, it was that way all across Siberia to the
Kolyma, and the big bottleneck was in the Sea of Okhotsk, and
in Vladivostok. The steamships could transport only thirty thou-
sand a month, and they kept driving them on and on from
Moscow without taking that into account. Well, and so a hundred
thousand of them piled up. Understand?”

“Who counted them?”

“Whoever was supposed to, counted.”

536 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

“If you’re talking about the Vladivostok Transit Prison, then
in February, 1937, there weren’t more than forty thousand there.”

“People were stuck there for several months at a time. The
bedbugs infested the board bunks like locusts. Half a mug of
water a day; there wasn’t any more!—no one to haul it. There
was one whole compound of Koreans, and they all died from
dysentery, every last one of them. They took a hundred corpses
out of our own compound every morning. They were building
a morgue, so they hitched the zeks to the carts and hauled the
stone that way. Today you do the hauling, and tomorrow they
haul you there yourself. And in autumn the typhus arrived. And
we did the same thing: we didn’t hand over the corpses till they
stank—and took the extra rations. No medication whatever. We
crawled to the fence and begged: ‘Give us medicine.’ And the
guards fired a volley from the watchtowers. Then they as-
sembled those with typhus in a separate barracks. Some didn’t
make it there, and only a few came back. The bunks there had
two stories. And anyone on an upper who was sick and running
a fever wasn’t able to clamber down to go to the toilet—and so
it would all pour down on the people underneath. There were
fifteen hundred sick there. And all the orderlies were thieves.
They’d pull out the gold teeth from the corpses. And not only
from the corpses.”

“Why do you keep going on and on about 1937? What about
1949 on Vanino Bay, in the fifth compound? What about that?
There were 35,000! And for several months too! There was an-
other bottleneck in transport to the Kolyma. And every night for
some reason they kept driving people from one barracks to an-
other and from one compound to another. Just as it was with the
Fascists: Whistles! Screams! ‘Come on out there without the last
one! And everyone went on the run! Always on the run! They’d
drive a hundred to get bread—on the run! For gruel—on the
run! No bowls to eat from. Take the gruel in whatever you
could—the flap of your coat, your hands! They brought water
in big tanks and there was nothing to distribute it in, so they shot
it out in sprays. And whoever could get his mouth in front of one

1. “Without the last one!”—a menacing command to be understood literally.
It meant: “I will kill the last man” (literally or at least warm his hide with a
club). And so all piled out so as not to be last.

The Ports of the Archipelago | 537

got some. Prisoners began to fight in front of the tanks—and the
guards fired on them from the towers. Exactly like under the
Fascists! Major General Derevyanko, the Chief of Administration
of the Northeast [i.e., Kolyma] Corrective Labor Camps, came,
and while he was there an air force aviator stepped out in front
of the crowd and ripped his field shirt down the front: ‘I have
seven battle decorations! Who gave you the right to shoot into the
compound?’ And Derevyanko replied: ‘We shot and we will go
on shooting until you learn how to behave.’ ”?

“No, boys, none of those are real transit prisons. Now take
Kirov! That was a real one! Let’s not take any special year, but,
say, 1947. Even then in Kirov two turnkeys had to work together
with their boots to jam people into a cell, that being the only way
they could get the door shut. In September (and Kirov—formerly
Vyatka—isn’t on the Black Sea either) everyone was sitting
naked on the three-story bunks because of the heat. They were
sitting because there was no place to lie down: one row sat at the
heads of the bunks and one row at the feet. And two rows sat
on the floor in the aisle, and others stood between them, and
they took turns. They kept their knapsacks in their hands or
on their knees because there was nowhere to put them down.
Only the thieves were in their lawful places, the second-story
bunks next to the windows, and they spread out as they pleased.
There were so many bedbugs that they went right on biting in
the daytime, and they dive-bombed straight from the ceiling.
And people had to suffer through that for a week or even a
month.”

I myself would like to interrupt in order to tell about Krasnaya
Presnya® in August, 1945, in the Victory summer, but I am shy:
after all, in Krasnaya Presnya we could somehow stretch out our
legs at night, and the bedbugs were moderate, and flies bit us all
night long as we lay naked and sweaty under the bright lights,
but of course that’s nothing at all, and I would be ashamed to
boast about it. We streamed with sweat every time we moved,

2. Say there, Bertrand Russell’s “War Crimes Tribunal”! Why don’t you
use this bit of material? Or doesn’t it suit you?

3. This transit prison with its glorious revolutionary name is little known
to Muscovites. There are no excursions to it, and how could there be when
it is still in operation? But to get a close look at it, you don’t have to travel
any distance at all. It’s a mere stone’s throw from the Novokhoroshevo High-
way on the circle line.

538 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

and it simply poured out of us after we ate. There were a hundred
of us in a cell a little larger than the average room in an apart-
ment, and we were packed in, and you couldn’t find a place on
the floor for your feet. And two little windows on the south side
were blocked with “muzzles” made of steel sheets. They not only
kept the air from circulating, but they got very hot from the sun
and radiated heat into the cell.

Just as all transit prisons are pointless, talk about transit
prisons is pointless, and, in all probability, this chapter, too, will
turn out to be the same: one doesn’t know what to take hold of
first, what particular thing to talk about, what to lead off with.
And the more people that are crowded into transit prisons, the
more pointless it all becomes. It is unbearable for a human being,
and it is inexpedient for Gulag—but people sit there month after
month. And the transit prison becomes a straight factory: bread
rations are lugged in, stacked up in hand barrows like those in
which bricks are hauled. And the steaming gruel is brought in
six-bucket wooden casks that have holes knocked in them with
a crowbar.

The transit prison at Kotlas was tenser and more aboveboard
than many. Tenser because it opened the way to the whole North-
east of European Russia, and more aboveboard because it was
already deep in the Archipelago, and there was no need to pre-
tend to anybody. It was simply a piece of land divided into cages
by fencing and the cages were all kept locked. Although it
had been thickly settled by peasants when they were exiled in
1930 (one must realize that they had no roofs over their heads,
but nobody is left to tell about it), even in 1938 there simply
wasn’t room for everyone in the frail one-story wooden barracks
made of discarded end-pieces of lumber and covered with ...
tarpaulin. Under the wet autumn snow and in freezing tempera-
tures people simply lived there on the ground, beneath the
heavens. True, they weren’t allowed to grow numb from in-
activity. They were being counted endlessly; they were in-
vigorated by check-ups (twenty thousand people were there at
a time) or by sudden night searches. Later on tents were pitched
in these cages, and log houses two stories high were built in some
of them, but to reduce the construction costs sensibly, no floor
was laid between the stories—six-story bunks with stepladders

The Ports of the Archipelago | 539

were simply built into the sides, up and down which prisoners
on their last legs, on the verge of dying, had to clamber like
sailors (a structure which would have adorned a ship more
appropriately than a port). In the winter of 1944-1945, when
everyone had a roof over his head, there was room for only 7,500
prisoners, and fifty of them died every day, and the stretchers on
which they were carried to the morgue were never idle. (People
will object that this was quite acceptable—a death rate of less
than one percent per day—and that, given that sort of turnover,
a person might manage to last five months. Yes, but the main
killer was camp labor, and that hadn’t even begun yet for transit
prisoners. This loss of two-thirds of one percent per day repre-
sents sheer shrinkage, and it would be intolerably high even in
some vegetable warehouses. )

The deeper into the Archipelago one got, the more obviously
did the concrete docks of the Archipelago become transformed
into wharves made of wooden pilings.

In the course of several years, half a million people passed
through Karabas, the transit camp near Karaganda, whose name
became a byword in the language. (Yuri Karbe was there in
1942 and was already registered in the 433rd thousand.) The
transit prison consisted of low rammed-earth barracks with
earthen floors. Daily recreation there consisted in driving all the
prisoners out with their things and putting artists to work white-
washing the floor and even painting carpets on it, and then in
the evening the zeks would lie down on it, and their bodies would
rub out both the whitewash and the carpets.*

The Knyazh-Pogost transit point (latitude 63 degrees north)
consisted of shacks built on a swamp. Their pole frames were
covered with torn tarpaulin tenting that didn’t quite reach the
ground. The double bunks inside them were also made of poles
(from which, incidentally, the branches had been only partially
removed), and the aisle was floored with poles also. During the
day, the wet mud squelched through the flooring, and at night it
froze. In various parts of the area, the walkways were laid on
frail and shaky poles and here and there people whom weakness

4. Of all the transit prisons Karabas was worthiest of becoming a museum.
But, alas, it no longer exists: in its place there is a factory for reinforced-
concrete products.

540 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

had made clumsy fell into the water and ooze. In 1938 they fed
the prisoners in Knyazh-Pogost the same thing every day: a mash
made of crushed grits and fish bones. This was convenient be-
cause there were no bowls, spoons, or forks at the transit prison
and the prisoners had none of their own either. They were herded
to the boiler by the dozens and the mash was ladled into their
caps or the flaps of their jackets.

And in the transit prison of Vogvozdino (several miles from
Ust-Vym), where five thousand prisoners were kept at a time
(now who ever heard of Vogvozdino before this sentence? how
many such unknown transit prisons were there? and then multiply
that by 5,000), the food was liquid, but they had no bowls either.
However, they managed without them (what is there that our
Russian ingenuity cannot overcome?) by distributing the gruel
in washbasins for ten people at a time, leaving them to race each
other gulping it down.’

True, no one was imprisoned in Vogvozdino longer than a
year. (The kind of prisoner who would have been imprisoned there
that long was a prisoner on his last legs whom all the camps had
refused to accept.)

The imagination of writers is poverty-stricken in regard to the
native life and customs of the Archipelago. When they want to
write about the most reprehensible and disgraceful aspect of
prison, they always accuse the latrine bucket. In literature the
latrine bucket has become the symbol of prison, a symbol of
humiliation, of stink. Oh, how frivolous can you be? Now was
the latrine bucket really an evil for the prisoner? On the contrary,
it was the most merciful device of the prison administration. The
actual horror began the moment there was no latrine bucket in
the cell.

In 1937 there were no latrine buckets in certain Siberian prisons,
or there weren’t enough. Not enough of them had been made
ahead of time—Siberian industry hadn’t caught up with the full
scope of arrests. There were no latrine barrels in the warehouses
for the newly created cells. There were old latrine buckets in the

5. Galina Serebryakova! Boris Dyakov! Aldan-Semyonov! Did you ever
gulp from a washbasin, ten at a time? And if you had, you would never,
of course, have descended to the “animal needs” of Ivan Denisovich, would
you? And in the midst of the mob scene at the washbasin you would have
continued to think only about your dear Party?

The Ports of the Archipelago | 541

cells, but they were antiquated and small, and the only reasonable
thing to do at that point was to remove them, since they amounted
to nothing at all for the new reinforcements of prisoners. So if long
ago the Minusinsk Prison had been built for five hundred people
(Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was never inside it; he moved about
freely), and there were now ten thousand in it, it meant that each
latrine bucket ought to have become twenty times bigger. But it
had not.

Our Russian pens write only in large letters. We have lived
through so very much, and almost none of it has been described
and called by its right name. But, for Western authors, peering
through a microscope at the living cells of everyday life, shaking
a test tube in the beam of a strong light, this is after all a whole
epic, another ten volumes of Remembrance of Things Past: to
describe the perturbation of a human soul placed in a cell filled
to twenty times its capacity and with no latrine bucket, where
prisoners are taken out to the toilet only once a day! Of course,
much of the texture of this life is bound to be quite unknown to
Western writers; they wouldn’t realize that in this situation one
solution was to urinate in your canvas hood, nor would they at
all understand one prisoner’s advice to another to urinate in his
boot! And yet that advice was the fruit of wisdom derived from
vast experience, and it didn’t involve spoiling the boot and it
didn’t reduce the boot to the status of a pail. It meant that the
boot had to be taken off, turned upside down, the boot tops turned
inside out and up—and thus a cylindrical vessel was formed that
constituted the much-needed container. But, at the same time,
with what psychological twists and turns Western writers could
enrich their literature (without in the least risking any banal repe-
tition of the famous masters) if they only knew about the scheme
of things in that same Minusinsk Prison: there was only one food
bowl for every four prisoners; and one mug of drinking water per
day was issued to each (there were enough mugs to go around).
And it could happen that one of the four contrived to use the
bowl allotted to him and three others to relieve his internal pres-
sure and then refuse to hand over his daily water ration to wash
it out before lunch. What a conflict! What a clash of four per-
sonalities! What nuances! (And I am not joking. That is when
the rock bottom of a human being is revealed. It is only that

542 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

Russian pens are too busy to write about it, and Russian eyes
don’t have time to read about it. I am not joking—because only
doctors can tell us how months in such a cell will ruin a human
being’s health for his entire life, even if he wasn’t shot under
Yezhov and was rehabilitated under Khrushchev. )

And just to think that we had dreamed of resting and loosening
up a bit in port! After being squashed and doubled up for sev-
eral days in the Stolypin, how we had dreamed of the transit
prison! That we could stretch out a bit there and straighten up.
That we would be able to go to the toilet there without hurrying!
That we would drink as much water there as we wanted, and get
as much hot water for tea. That there we wouldn’t be forced to
ransom our own bread rations from the convoy with our own
belongings. That we would be fed hot food there. And that at
last we would be taken to the bath, that we could drench our-
selves in hot water and stop itching. We had had elbows stuck into
our sides and been tossed from side to side in the Black Maria;
and they had shouted at us: “Link arms!” “Take hold of your
heels!” But we were in good spirits anyway: it was all right, all
right, soon we would be at the transit prison! And now we were
there.

And even if some part of our dreams came true in the transit
prison, something else would foul it all up anyway.

What awaits us in the bath? You can never be sure. They begin
suddenly to shave all the women’s hair off. (In Krasnaya Presnya,
in November, 1950.) Or a line of us naked men is clipped by
women barbers only. In the Vologda steam room, portly Aunt
Motya used ‘to shout: “Stand up, men!” And she’d let the whole
line have it from the steam pipe. And the Irkutsk Transit Prison
argued differently: it’s more natural for the entire service staff in
the bath to be male and for a man to smear on the medicinal tar
ointment between the women’s legs. Or during the winter, in the
cold soaping-up room of the Novosibirsk Transit Prison only
cold water comes from the faucets; the prisoners make up their
minds to ask higher-ups, and a captain comes, puts his own hand
unfastidiously under a faucet: “I say this water is hot, get it?”
I have already wearied of reporting that there are baths which
have no water at all, that they scorch clothes in the roaster, that

The Ports of the Archipelago | 543

after the bath they compel people to run naked and barefoot
through the snow to get their things (the counterintelligence of
the Second Byelorussian Front in Brodnica in 1945).

From your very first steps in the transit prison you realize that
here you are not in the hands of the jailers or the officers of the
prison administration, who at least adhere some of the time to some
kind of written law. Here you are in the hands of the trusties. That
surly bath attendant who comes to meet your prisoner transport:
“Well, go wash, gentlemen Fascists!” And that work-assignment
clerk with a plywood writing board who looks over your forma-
tion searchingly and hurries you up. And that instructor, clean-
shaven except for a prominent forelock, who slaps his leg with
that rolled-up newspaper and at the same time gives your bags a
once-over. And then other transit-prison trusties, whom you don’t
recognize, penetrate your suitcases with X-ray eyes—oh, how
alike they all are! And where in your brief prisoner-transport
journey have you seen them all before? Not so clean-looking, not
so well washed, but the same kind of ugly-mug swine with pitiless,
bare-toothed grins?

Baaaah! These are the same blatnye, the thieves, again. Those
same urki crooks, whom Leonid Utyosov glorifies in his songs.
Here again are Zhenka Zhogol, Seryoga-Zver, and Dimka Kish-
kenya, but not behind bars this time; they have been cleaned up,
dressed up as representatives of the state. And putting on airs of
great importance, they see to it that discipline is observed—by us.
And if one peers into those snouts, one can even, with imagina-
tion, picture that they sprang from the same Russian roots as the
rest of us—that once upon a time they were village boys whose
fathers bore such names as Klim, Prokhor, Guri, and that their
general structure is even similar to our own: two nostrils, two
irises in the eyes, a rosy tongue with which to swallow food and
utter certain Russian sounds, which, however, shape totally new
words.

Every chief of a transit prison has enough presence of mind to
realize that he can send his relatives back home the wages for all
staff positions or else he can divvy them up with the other prison
officers. And all you have to do is whistle to get as many vol-
unteers as you want from among the socially friendly prison ele-
ments to carry out all that work just in return for being allowed to

544 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

cast anchor at the transit prison and not have to go on to a mine
or to the taiga. All these work-assignment clerks, office clerks,
bookkeepers, instructors, bath attendants, barbers, stockroom
clerks, cooks, dishwashers, laundresses, tailors who repair under-
wear and linens—are permanent transit-prison residents. They
receive prison rations and are registered in cells, and they swipe
the rest of their soup and chow on their own out of the common
food pot or out of the bundles of the transit zeks. All these transit-
prison trusties regard it as certain that they will never be better
off in any camp. We arrive in their hands still not completely
plucked, and they bamboozle us to their hearts’ content. It is they
and not the jailers who search us and our belongings here, and
before the search they suggest we turn in our money for safekeep-
ing, and they seriously write down a list—we never see the list
or the money again. “We turned in our money.” “Who to?” the
officer who has arrived on the scene asks in surprise. “Well, it
was one of them.” “Who exactly?” The trusties hadn’t noticed
which one. “Why did you turn it over to him?” “We thought .. .”
“That’s what the turkey thought! Think less and you'll be better
off.” And that’s that. They suggest we leave our things in the
vestibule to the bath: “No one’s going to take them. Who needs
them?” We leave them, for after all we can’t take them into the
bath with us anyway. We return and there are no sweaters left and
no fur-lined mittens. “What kind of a sweater was it?” “Grayish.”
“Well, that means it went to the laundry.” They also take things
from us honestly: in return for taking a suitcase into the storage
room for safekeeping; for putting us in a cell without the thieves;
for sending us off on prisoner transports as soon as possible; for
not sending us off as long as possible: The only thing they don’t
do is rob us by main force out in the open.

“But those aren’t thieves!” the connoisseurs among us explain.
“These are the bitches—the ones who work for the prison. They
are enemies of the honest thieves. And the honest thieves are the
ones imprisoned in cells.” But somehow this is hard for our rab-
bity brains to grasp. Their ways are the same; they have the same
kind of tattoos. Maybe they really are enemies of those others,
but after all they are not our friends either, that’s how it is... .

And by this time they have forced us to sit down in the yard
right underneath the cell windows. The windows all have “muz-

The Ports of the Archipelago | 545

zles” on them and you can’t look in, but from inside, hoarse,
friendly voices advise: “Hey, fellows! You know what they do
here? When they search you, they take away everything loose like
tea and tobacco. If you have any, toss it in here, through our
window. We’ll give it back later.” So what do you know? We are
suckers and rabbits. Maybe they do take tea and tobacco away.
We have read about universal prisoner solidarity in all our great
literature, that one prisoner won’t deceive another. The way they
spoke to us was friendly. “Hey, fellows!” And so we toss them our
tobacco pouches. And the genuine pure-bred thieves on the other
side catch them and guffaw: “You Fascist stupes.”

And here are the slogans with which the whole transit prison
welcomes us even though they don’t actually hang them on the
walls: “Don’t look for justice here!” “Youre going to have to
hand over everything you’ve got to us.” “You'll have to give it
all up.” This is repeated to you by the jailers, the convoy, and the
thieves. You are overwhelmed by your unbearable prison term,
and you are trying to figure out how to catch your breath, while
everyone around you is figuring out how to plunder you. Every-
thing works out so as to oppress the political prisoner, who is
already depressed and abandoned without all that. “You will
have to give it all up.” The jailer at the Gorky Transit Prison
shakes his head hopelessly; and with a sense of relief, Ans Bern-
shtein gives him his officer’s greatcoat—not free, but in exchange
for two onions. And why should you complain about the thieves
if you see all the jailers at Krasnaya Presnya wearing chrome-
leather boots they were never issued? They were all lifted by the
thieves in the cells and then pushed to the jailers. Why complain
about the thieves if the instructor of the Cultural and Educational
Department of the camp administration is a blatnoi, a thief, him-
self and writes reports on the politicals? (The Kem Transit
Prison.) And how are you ever going to get justice against the
thieves in the Rostov Transit Prison when this is their ancient
native tribal den?

They say that in 1942 at the Gorky Transit Prison some officer
prisoners (including Gavrilov, the military engineer Shchebetin,
and others) nonetheless rebelled, beat up the thieves, and forced
them to stay in line. But this is always regarded as a legend; did
the thieves capitulate in just one of the cells? For long? And

546 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

how was it that the bluecaps allowed the socially hostile elements
to beat up the socially friendly ones? And when they say that at
the Kotlas Transit Prison in 1940 the thieves started to grab
money right out of the hands of the politicals lined up at the
commissary, and the politicals began to beat them up so badly
that they couldn’t be stopped, and the perimeter guards entered
the compound with machine guns to defend the thieves—now
there’s something that rings true. That’s the way it really was.

Foolish relatives! They dash about in freedom, borrow money
(because they never have that kind of money at home), and send
you foodstuffs and things—the widow’s last mite, but also a
poisoned gift, because it transforms you from a free though
hungry person into one who is anxious and cowardly, and it
deprives you of that newly dawning enlightenment, that toughen-
ing resolve, which are all you need for your descent into the abyss.
Oh, wise Gospel saying about the camel and the eye of the
needle! These material things will keep you from entering the
heavenly kingdom of the liberated spirit. And you see that others
in the police van have the same kind of bags as you. “Ragbag
bastards!” the thieves have already snarled at you in the Black
Maria—but there were only two of them and there were fifty of
you and so far they haven’t touched you. And now they were
holding us for the second day at the Krasnaya Presnya station
with our legs tucked beneath us on the dirty floor because we were
so crowded. However, none of us was observing the life going on
around us, because we were all too concerned with how to turn
in our suitcases for safekeeping. Even though we were supposed
to have the right to turn in our things for safekeeping, nonetheless
the only reason the work-assignment clerks permitted us to do it
was because the prison was a Moscow prison and we ourselves
hadn’t yet lost our Moscow look.

What a relief—our things had been checked. (And that meant
we would have to give them up not at this transit prison but later
on.) The only things left dangling from our hands were our
bundles with our ill-fated foodstuffs. Too many of us beavers
had been assembled in one place. They began to distribute us
among different cells. I was shoved into a cell with that same
Valentin whom I had been with the day I signed for my OSO
sentence, and who had proposed with touching sentiment that we

The Ports of the Archipelago | 547

begin a new life in camp. It was not yet packed full. The aisle
was free. There was plenty of space under the bunks. According
to the traditional arrangement, the thieves occupied the second
tier of bunks: their senior members were beside the windows, their
juniors farther back. A neutral gray mass was on the lower bunks.
No one attacked us. Without looking around and without thinking
ahead, inexperienced as we were, we sat down on the asphalt
floor and crawled under the bunks. We would even be cozy there.
The bunks were low for big men to get under, and we had to
slide in on our bellies, inching along the asphalt floor. We did.
And we were going to lie there quietly and talk quietly. Not a
chance! In the semidarkness, with a wordless rustling, from all
sides juveniles crept up on us on all fours, like big rats. They
were still boys, some twelve-year-olds even, but the Criminal Code
accepted them too. They had already been processed through a
thieves’ trial, and they were continuing their apprenticeship with
the thieves here. They had been unleashed on us. They jumped
us from all sides and six pairs of hands stripped from us and
wrenched from under us all our wealth. And all this took place in
total silence, with only the sound of sinister sniffing. And we were
trapped: we couldn’t get up, we couldn’t move. It took no more
than a minute for them to seize the bundles with the fat bacon,
sugar, and bread. They were gone. We lay there feeling stupid.
We had given up our food without a fight. And we could go on
lying there now, but that was utterly impossible. Creeping out
awkwardly, rear ends first, we got up from under the bunks.

Am I a coward? I had thought I wasn’t one. I had pushed my
way into the heat of a bombing in the open steppe, I hadn’t been
afraid to drive over a trail obviously mined with antitank mines.
I had remained coolheaded when I led my battery out of encircle-
ment and went back in for a damaged command car. Why, then,
at that moment didn’t I grab one of those human rats and grate
his rosy face on the black asphalt? Was he too small? Well then,
go for their leaders. But no. At the front we are strengthened
by some kind of supplementary awareness (and quite false, too,
perhaps): is it a sense of our military unity? The sense of being
in the right place at the right time? Of duty? But in this new situ-
ation nothing is clear, there are no rules, and everything has to be
learned by feel.

548 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

Getting to my feet, I turned to their senior, the pakhan, the
ringleader of the thieves. All the stolen victuals were there in front
of him beside the window on the second tier of bunks: the juvenile
rats hadn’t eaten a thing themselves. They were disciplined.
Nature had sculpted the front part of the ringleader’s head, in
bipeds usually called a face, with nausea and hate. Or perhaps it
had come to be what it was from living the life of a beast of prey.
It sagged crookedly and loosely, with a low forehead, a savage
scar, and modern steel crowns on the front teeth. His little eyes
were exactly large enough to see all familiar objects and yet not
take delight in the beauties of the world. He looked at me as a
boar looks at a deer, knowing he could always knock me off
my feet.

He was waiting. And what did I do? Leap forward to smash
my fist in that ugly mug at least once and then go down in the
aisle? Alas, I did not.

Am I a scoundrel? Until that moment I had always thought
that I wasn’t. But now, plundered and humiliated, I found it
offensive to get down flat on my stomach again and crawl back
beneath the bunks. And so I addressed the ringleader of the
thieves indignantly and told him that since he had taken our food
away from us he might at least give us a place on the bunks.
(Now just tell me, wasn’t that a natural complaint for a city
dweller and an officer? )

And what happened then? The ringleader of the thieves agreed.
After all, I was thereby surrendering any claim to the fat bacon;
and I was thereby recognizing his superior authority; and I was
revealing a point of view in common with his—he, too, would
have driven off the weakest. And he gave orders for two of the
gray neutrals to get off the lower bunks beside the window and
free a space for us. They obeyed submissively. And we lay down
in the best places. For a while we still grieved over our loss. (The
thieves paid no attention to my military breeches. They weren’t
their kind of uniform. But one of the thieves was already fingering
Valentin’s woolen trousers. He liked them.) And it was only at
night that the reproachful whisper of our neighbors reached us:
how could we ask the thieves to help us by driving two of our own
people under the bunks in our place? And only then did aware-
ness of my own meanness prick my conscience and make me
blush. (And for many years thereafter I blushed every time I

The Ports of the Archipelago | 549

remembered it.) The gray prisoners on the lower bunks were my
own brothers, 58-1b, the POW’s. Had I not just a short while ago
sworn to assume the burden of their fate? And then I had shunted
them off under the bunks. True, they hadn’t done anything to
defend us against the thieves. But why should they have fought
for our fat bacon if we ourselves didn’t? They had had enough
cruel fights back in POW camps to destroy their faith in decency.
But they hadn’t done me any harm, and I had them.

And thus it is that we have to keep getting banged on flank
and snout again and again so as to become, in time at least,
human beings, yes, human beings. . . .

But even for the newcomer whom the transit prison cracks open
and shucks, it is very, very necessary. It gives him some gradual
preparation for camp life. Such a change all in one step would be
more than the heart could bear. His consciousness would be un-
able to orient itself in that murk all at once. It has to happen
gradually.

Then, too, the transit prison gave the prisoner the semblance
of communicating with home. It was there he wrote the first
letter he was permitted to: reporting that he hadn’t been shot and,
sometimes, the direction of his prisoner transport, and these were
always the first unfamiliar words home of a man who had been
plowed over by interrogation. At home they continued to re-
member him as he had been, but he would never be that person
again. And that could suddenly, like a stroke of lightning, become
apparent in one or another clumsily written line. Clumsily written
because, even though letters could be sent from transit prisons,
and there was a mailbox in the yard, it was impossible to get
either paper or pencils—or anything to sharpen a pencil with.
However, a makhorka wrapper or one from a sugar packet could
turn up and be smoothed out, and someone in the cell would have
a pencil—and so lines would be written in an undecipherable
scrawl which would determine the family’s future peace or dis-
cord.

Women driven out of their minds by receiving such a letter
would sometimes precipitately rush off and try to get to their

550 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

husbands at the transit prison—even though visits were never
allowed and they would have succeeded only in burdening him
with things. One such woman provided, in my opinion, the theme
for a monument to all wives—and even indicated the place for it.

This was in the Kuibyshev Transit Prison in 1950. The prison
was situated in a low-lying area (from which, however, the
Zhiguli Gates of the Volga River could be seen). And right above
the prison, bordering it on the east, rose a high, long, grassy hill.
It was outside the camp compound and above it; and from the in-
side and down below we couldn’t see the approach to it. Very
rarely did anyone ever appear up there, although sometimes goats
were pastured there or children played. And one cloudy summer
day a city woman appeared on its ridge. Shading her eyes with
her hand and barely moving, she began to scan our compound
from above. At the time, three heavily populated cells were taking
their outdoor walk in three separate exercise yards—and there
in the abyss among those three hundred depersonalized ants she
hoped to catch sight of her man! Did she hope that her heart
would tell her which one he was? In all probability they had re-
fused to allow her a visit with him and so she had climbed that
hill. Everyone noticed her from the courtyards and everyone
stared at her. Down below in the hollow there was no wind, but
it was blowing hard up above. It made her long dress, her jacket,
and her long hair stream out and billow, expressing all that love
and anxiety which possessed her.

I think that a statue of such a woman, right there on that spot,
on the hill overlooking the transit prison, with her face to the
Zhiguli Gates, just as she actually stood, might explain at least
a little something to our grandchildren.*®

6. After all, someday the hidden and all but lost story of our Archipelago
will be portrayed in monuments too! And I visualize, for example, one more
such project: somewhere on a high point in the Kolyma, a most enormous
Stalin, just such a size as he himself dreamed of, with mustaches many feet
long and the bared fangs of a camp commandant, one hand holding the reins
and the other wielding a knout with which to beat his team of hundreds
of people harnessed in fives and all pulling hard. This would also be a
fine sight on the edge of the Chukchi Peninsula next to the Bering Strait.
(I had written this before I read “The Bas-Relief on the Cliff.” And that
means there is something to the idea. They say that on Mogutova Hill
at the Zhiguli Gates on the Volga, a mile from the camp, there used to be
an enormous oil portrait of Stalin which had been painted on the cliff for
the benefit of passing steamers.)

The Ports of the Archipelago | 551

She was there for a long time and they didn’t drive her off,
probably because the guards were too lazy to climb the hill. But
finally a soldier climbed up and began to shout and wave his hands
at her—and chased her away.

The transit prison also gives the prisoner some kind of over-all
view, some breadth of outlook. As they say: even though there’s
nothing to eat, still it’s a gay life. In the incessant traffic here, in
the comings and goings of dozens and hundreds of people, in the
frankness of the stories and conversations (in camp they don’t
talk so freely because they are always afraid there of stepping
into the trap of the Oper, the Security officer), you are refreshed,
you are aired out, you become more lucid, and you begin to un-
derstand better what is happening to you, to your people, even to
the world. Even one single eccentric who turns up in your cell can
tell you things you'll never in your life read about.

All of a sudden they introduce into the cell some kind of
miracle: a tall young military man with a Roman profile, curly
and unclipped flaxen locks, in a British uniform—just as if he
had come straight from the Normandy landing, an officer of the
invading army. He enters as proudly as if he expected everyone
to rise to their feet in his presence. And it turns out that he had
simply not expected to be among friends at this point: he had
already been imprisoned for two years, but he had never yet been
in a cell and he had been brought secretly, right to the transit
prison itself, in an individual Stolypin compartment. And then,
unexpectedly, either by mistake or else with special intent, he
had been admitted to our common stable. He looked around the
cell, saw a Wehrmacht officer there in German uniform, and
started to argue with him in German; and there they were arguing
heatedly, ready, it seemed, to resort to weapons if they’d had any.
Five years had passed since the war, and it had been drummed
into us that in the West the war had been waged only for the sake
of appearances, and to us it was strange to observe their mutual
outrage: the German had been with us for a long time, and we
Russians hadn’t argued with him; for the most part we had
laughed with him.

No one would have believed the story of Erik Arvid Andersen
had it not been for his unshorn locks—a miracle unique in all

552 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

Gulag. And that foreign bearing of his. And his fluent English,
German, and Swedish speech. According to him he was the son
of a rich Swede—not merely a millionaire but a billionaire. (Well,
let’s assume he embellished a little.) On his mother’s side he was
a nephew of the British General Robertson, who commanded the
British Zone in occupied Germany. A Swedish subject, he had
served as a volunteer in the British Army and had actually landed
in Normandy, and after the war he had become a Swedish career
officer. However, the investigation of social systems remained one
of his principal interests. His thirst for socialism was stronger
than his attachment to his father’s capital. He looked upon Soviet
socialism with feelings of profound sympathy, and he had even
had the chance to become convinced of its flourishing state with
his ówn eyes when he had come to Moscow as a member of
a Swedish military delegation. They had been given banquets
and taken to country homes and there they had encountered
no obstacles at all to establishing contact with ordinary Soviet
citizens—with pretty actresses who for some reason never had to
rush off to work and who willingly spent time with them, even
téte-a-téte. And thus convinced once and for all of the triumph
of our social system, Erik on his return to the West wrote articles
in the press defending and praising Soviet socialism. And this
proved to be his undoing. In those very years, in 1947 and 1948,
they were roping in from all sorts of nooks and crannies progres-
sive young Westerners prepared to renounce the West publicly
(and it appeared that if they could only have collected another
dozen or so the West would shudder and collapse). Erik’s news-
paper articles caused him to be regarded as suitable for this
category. At the time he was serving in West Berlin, and he had
left his wife in Sweden. And out of pardonable male weakness
he used to visit an unmarried German girl in East Berlin. And it
was there that he was bound and gagged one night (and is not
this the significance of the proverb which says: “He went to see
his cousin, and he ended up in prison”? This had probably been
going on for a long time, and he wasn’t the first). They took him
to Moscow, where Gromyko, who had once dined at his father’s
home in Stockholm and who knew the son also, not only returned
the hospitality but proposed to the young man that he renounce
publicly both capitalism and his own father. And in return he was

The Ports of the Archipelago | 553

promised full and complete capitalist maintenance to the end of
his days here in our country. But to Gromyko’s surprise, although
Erik would not have suffered any material loss, he became in-
dignant and uttered some very insulting words. Since they didn’t
believe in his strength of mind, they locked him up in a dacha
outside Moscow, fed him like a prince in a fairy tale (sometimes
they used “awful methods of repression” on him: they refused to
accept his orders for the following day’s menu and instead of the
spring chicken he ordered they simply brought him a steak, just
like that), surrounded him with the works of Marx-Engels-Lenin-
Stalin, and waited a year for him to be re-educated. To their sur-
prise it didn’t happen. At that point they quartered with him a
former lieutenant general who had already served two years in
Norilsk. They probably calculated that by relating the horrors
of camp the lieutenant general would persuade Erik to surrender.
But either he carried out that assignment badly or else he didn’t
want to carry it out. After ten months of their being imprisoned
together, the only thing he had taught Erik was broken Russian,
and he had bolstered Erik’s growing repugnance for the bluecaps.
In the summer of 1950 they once more summoned Erik to Vyshin-
sky and he once more refused (in so doing, he made existence
contingent on consciousness, thereby violating all the Marxist-
Leninist rules!). And then Abakumov himself read Erik the
decree: twenty years in prison (what for???). They themselves
already regretted having gotten mixed up with this ignoramus,
but at the same time they couldn’t release him and let him go back
to the West. And so they transported him in a separate compart-
ment, and it was there that he had heard the story of the Moscow
girl through the partition and seen through the train window in
the dawn light the rotting straw-thatched roofs of the age-old
Russia of Ryazan.

Those two years had very strongly confirmed him in his
loyalty to the West. He believed blindly in the West. He did not
want to recognize its weaknesses. He considered Western armies
unbeatable and Western political leaders faultless. He refused
to believe us when we told him that during the period of his im-
prisonment Stalin had begun a blockade of Berlin and had gotten
away with it perfectly well. Erik’s milky neck and creamy cheeks
blushed with indignation whenever we ridiculed Churchill and

554 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

Roosevelt. And he was also certain that the West would not
countenance his, Erik’s, imprisonment; that on the basis of in-
formation from the Kuibyshev Transit Prison the Western intel-
ligence services would immediately learn that Erik had not
drowned in the Spree River but had been imprisoned in the Soviet
Union—and either he would be ransomed or someone would be
exchanged for him. (This faith of his in the individual importance
of his own fate among other prisoners’ fates was reminiscent of
our own well-intentioned orthodox Soviet Communists.) Not-
withstanding our heated arguments, he invited my friend and me
to Stockholm whenever we could come. (“Everyone knows us
there,” he said with a tired smile. “My father virtually maintains
the Swedish King’s whole court.”) For the time being, however,
the son of the billionaire had nothing to dry himself with, and I
presented him with an extra tattered towel as a gift. And soon
they took him away on a prisoner transport.’

And the movement of people was endless. Prisoners were
brought in and taken away, singly and in groups, and driven off
in prisoner transports. Appearing so businesslike on the surface,
so planned, this movement was marked by such stupidity that
one can hardly believe it.

In 1949 the Special Camps were created. And then and there,
on the basis of some summit decision, masses of women were
driven from camps in the European North and the Trans-Volga
area, through the Sverdlovsk Transit Prison, to Siberia, to Taishet,
to Ozerlag. But in 1950 someone found it convenient to assemble

7. Since that time I have asked Swedes I have met or travelers going to
Sweden how to find his family. Have they heard anything about such a missing
person? The only reply I have received is a smile. The name Andersen in
Sweden is like Ivanov in Russia—and there is no such billionaire. And it is
only now, twenty-two years later, rereading this book for the last time,
that I have suddenly realized: of course, they must have forbidden him to
give his real name! He must have been warned by Abakumov, of course, that
he would be destroyed if he did. And so he traveled through the transit prisons
in the guise of a Swedish Ivanov. And it was only through unforbidden, sec-
ondary details of his biography that he was able to leave behind in the
memories of those he encountered by chance some trace of his ruined life.
More likely he still thought it could be saved—which was only human—like
millions of other rabbits in this book. He thought he would be imprisoned for
a while and that thereupon the indignant West would free him. He did not
understand the strength of the East. And he did not understand that such a
witness as himself, who had displayed such firmness of will, unheard of in the

soft West, could never be released.
Yet perhaps he is still alive even today. (Author’s note, 1972.)

The Ports of the Archipelago | 555

all the women not in Ozerlag, but in Dubrovlag—in Temnikov,
in Mordvinia. And so all those same women, enjoying all the
conveniences of Gulag travel, were dragged through this same
Sverdlovsk Transit Prison—to the west. In 1951 new Special
Camps were set up in Kemerovo Province (Kamyshlag)—and
that turned out to be where the women’s labor was required. And
those ill-fated women were again put to the torment of being sent
to the Kemerovo camps through that same accursed Sverdlovsk
Transit Prison. The time came for liberation—but not for all of
them. All those women who were left to drag out their terms in
the midst of the general Khrushchev relaxation were once again
swung out of Siberia through the Sverdlovsk Transit Prison—into
Mordvinia: it was thought better to have them all together.

Well, after all, we have our own self-contained economy. The
isles are all our own. And the distances aren’t so very great for a
Russian.

And the same sort of thing happened to individual zeks, the
more unfortunate ones. Shendrik was a big, merry, open-faced
fellow, and he labored honestly, as they say, in one of the
_ Kuibyshev camps and had no intimation of the evil fate over-
taking him. But this evil fate struck nonetheless. An urgent order
arrived at the camp—not just from anybody but from the Minister
of Internal Affairs himself! (And how could the Minister know of
Shendrik’s existence?) The order was to deliver this Shendrik to
Prison No. 18 in Moscow immediately. They grabbed him,
dragged him off to the Kuibyshev Transit Prison, and from there
to Moscow with no delay. But not to some Prison No. 18; instead,
with all the rest, he went to the widely known Krasnaya Presnya
Prison. (Shendrik didn’t know about any Prison No. 18. No one
had told him.) But his misfortune did not drowse. No more than
two days had passed before they jerked him onto a prisoner trans-
port again and this time took him all the way to Pechora. The
landscape outside the train window grew ever sparser and grim-
mer. Shendrik was alarmed: he knew there was an order from the
Minister, and here they were rapidly hauling him off to the North,
and that meant that the Minister had some awful evidence against
him. In addition to all the other torments of the trip, they stole
three days of bread rations from him while he was en route. And
by the time he got to Pechora he was staggering. Pechora greeted

556 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

him inhospitably. They drove him out to work in the wet snow,
hungry and unsettled. In two days he never had a chance to dry
out his shirts nor even a chance to stuff his mattress with pine
needles. And right then they ordered him to turn in everything he
had that was government issue and once again they scooped him
up and whisked him still farther—to Vorkuta. It seemed quite
evident from everything that had happened that the Minister was
determined to destroy Shendrik, and not him alone but the entire
group in his prisoner transport. At Vorkuta they didn’t touch
Shendrik for a whole month. He went out to general-assignment
work, even though he had not yet recovered from his travels, but
he had begun to reconcile himself to his Arctic fate. And then
suddenly one day they called him out of the mine, and chased
him off breathless to the camp to turn in everything he had that
was government issue, and in one hour’s time he was being carried
off to the south. Now by this time it had already begun to smell
of personal vengeance! They took him to Moscow Prison No. 18.
They held him in the cell there for one month. And then he was
summoned to some lieutenant colonel who asked him: “Where the
hell have you been? Are you really a mechanical engineer?” And
Shendrik confessed that he was. And then they took him off to
none other than, yes, the Paradise Islands! (Yes, there are such
islands in the Archipelago! )

This coming and going of people, these destinies, and these
stories greatly enliven the transit prisons. And the old camp
veterans advise newcomers: Lie down and take it easy. They
feed you the guaranteed minimum here,’ and you don’t have to
tire your back. And when it’s not crowded you can sleep as much
as you want to. So just stretch out and lie there from one handout
of gruel to the next. The food is sparse, but the sleeping is good.
Only those who know what general-assignment work is in the
camps will understand that a transit prison is a rest home, a hap-
piness on our path. And one more advantage too: when you sleep
in the daytime the hours pass more quickly. If you can just kill off
the day, the night will go away on its own.

True, recalling that labor created the human being and that
only labor can reform the criminal, and sometimes having aux-
iliary projects, and sometimes acting as subcontractors in order

8. The rations guaranteed by Gulag when no work is being done.

The Ports of the Archipelago | 557

to keep up their financial end, the bosses of transit prisons might
sometimes even drive their loafing transit manpower out to labor.

The work at that same Kotlas Transit Prison before the war
was not the least bit easier than in a regular camp. In the course
of a winter day six or seven weakened prisoners were harnessed to
a tractor (!) sledge and had to drag it seven miles along the
Dvina River to the mouth of the Vychegda. They got stuck in
snow and fell down, and the sledges got stuck. And it would seem
that any work more wearing and debilitating could hardly have
been thought up! But it turned out that this wasn’t the actual
work, but merely the warm-up. There at the mouth of the
Vychegda, they had to load thirteen cubic yards of firewood on the
sledges—and the same people harnessed in the same way (Repin
is no longer with us, and this is no subject for our new artists;
it is merely a crude reproduction from nature) had to haul the
sledges back to their transit-prison home. Now what does a camp
have to offer after that! You wouldn’t even survive to get there.
(The work-brigade leader for that task was Kolupayev, and the
work horses were electrical engineer Dmitriyev, quartermaster
corps Lieutenant Colonel Belyayev, and Vasily Vlasov, who is
already familiar to us; but not all the other names can be col-
lected at this date. )

During the war the Arzamas Transit Prison fed its prisoners
beet tops and at the same time put them to work on a permanent
basis. There were garment shops, a footgear-felting shop (where
woolen fibers were fulled in hot water and acids).

In the summer of 1945 we went out of the stiflingly stagnant
cells of Krasnaya Presnya to work as volunteers: for the right to
breathe air the whole day long; for the right to sit unhurried and
unhindered in a quiet plank latrine (an incentive that is often
overlooked!) heated by the August sun (and these were the days
of Potsdam and Hiroshima), listening to the peaceful buzzing of a
lonely bee; and, last, for the right to get an extra quarter-pound
of bread at night. They took us to the wharves of the Moscow
River, where timber was being unloaded. It was our job to roll
the logs off some of the piles, carry them over and stack them in
other piles. We spent a good deal more strength than we received
extra food in compensation. Nonetheless we enjoyed going out to
work there.

558 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

I often have to blush at my recollections of my younger years
(and that’s where my younger years were spent!). But whatever
casts you down also teaches you a lot. And it turned out that as a
residue of the officer’s shoulder boards, which had trembled and
fluttered on my shoulders for two years in all, some kind of
poisonous golden dust had settled in the empty space between
my ribs. On that river wharf, which was a camplet too, there was
also a compound with watchtowers surrounding it. We were
merely transient, temporary work sloggers, and there had been
no talk at all, no rumor, that we might be allowed to stay and
serve out our terms there. But when they formed us up for the
first time, and the work-assignment foreman looked down the line
to pick out temporary work-brigade leaders, my worthless heart
was bursting under my woolen field shirt: Me, me, pick me!

I was not chosen. But why did I want it? I would only have
made further shameful mistakes.

Oh, how hard it is to part with power! This one has to under-
stand.

There was a time when Krasnaya Presnya became the virtual
capital of Gulag—in the sense that no matter where you went,
you couldn’t bypass it, just like Moscow. Just as when one travels
in the Soviet Union it is more convenient to proceed from Tash-
kent to Sochi and from Chernigov to Minsk via Moscow, they
dragged the prisoners there from all over and sent them off all
over via Presnya. And that was the way it was when I was there.
Presnya was at the point of breakdown from overcrowding. They
built a supplementary building. Only the through trains of cattle
cars carrying those who had been sentenced right at counterintel-
ligence bypassed Moscow on the circle line around it, which,
as it happened, went right past Presnya, perhaps even saluting it
with a whistle on the way.

But we do have a ticket when we come to Moscow as free
passengers in transit, and we hope sooner or later to proceed in
the desired direction. At Presnya at the end of the war and just
after, not only the prisoners who arrived there but even the very
highest-ranking officials and even the heads of Gulag itself were

The Ports of the Archipelago | 559

unable to predict who would proceed where. At that time the
prison system had not yet crystallized as it had by the fifties, and
there were no routes and no destinations were indicated for any-
body—except perhaps for service instructions: “Keep under
strict guard”; “To be employed only on general-assignment work.”
The convoy sergeants carried the bundles of prison cases, torn
folders tied somehow with twine or ersatz cotton string made of
paper, into a separate wooden building that housed the prison
offices, and tossed them onto shelves, on tables, under tables,
under chairs, and simply on the floor in the aisle (just as their
subject prisoners lay in the cells). They became untied and got
scattered and mixed up. One room, a second, and a third got
filled with those mixed-up cases. Secretaries from the prison office,
well-fed, lazy, free women in bright-colored dresses, sweated in
the heat, fanned themselves and flirted with prison and convoy
officers. None of them wanted to or had the strength to pick a way
through that chaos. And yet the trainloads had to be dispatched
in the red trains—several times a week. And every day a hundred
people had to be sent out on trucks to nearby camps. The case
of every zek had to be sent with him. So just who was going to
work on all that long-drawn-out mess? Who was there to sort
out the cases and select the prisoners for the transports?

It was entrusted to several work-assignment supervisors from
among the transit-prison trusties—who were either “bitches” or
“half-breeds.”® They moved freely through the prison corridors,
entered the prison office, and were the ones who decided whether
your case would be put in a bad prisoner transport or whether
they would really exert themselves, search long and hard, and put
it in a good one. (The newcomers were not mistaken in thinking
that there were whole camps which were death camps, and they
were right about that, but their idea that there were some that
were “good” was simply a delusion. There were no good camps,
but only certain easier duties within them—and they could only
be sorted out on the spot.) The fact that the prisoner’s whole
future depended on such another prisoner, with whom one ought
perhaps to find the chance fo talk (even if via the bath attendant),

9. “Half-breeds” or “mulattoes” (polutsvetnye in Russian) were prisoners
who had grown spiritually close to the thieves and tried to imitate them, but
who had nonetheless not been accepted by the thieves’ law.

560 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

and whose hand one ought perhaps to grease (even if via the
storage room keeper), was worse than if his fortunes had simply
been determined blindly by a roll of the dice. This invisible and
unrealized opportunity—to go south to Nalchik instead of north
to Norilsk in return for a leather jacket, to go to Serebryanny
Bor outside Moscow instead of Taishet in Siberia for a couple of
pounds of fat bacon (and perhaps to lose both the leather jacket
and the fat bacon for nothing at all)—-only aggravated and
fatigued tired souls. Maybe someone did manage to arrange it,
maybe someone got himself fixed up that way, but most blessed of
all were those who had nothing to give or who spared themselves
all that anxiety.

Submissiveness to fate, the total abdication of your own will in
the shaping of your life, the recognition that it was impossible to
guess the best and the worst ahead of time but that it was easy
to take a step you would reproach yourself for—all this freed the
prisoner from any bondage, made him calmer, and even ennobled
him.

And thus it was that the prisoners lay in rows in the cells, and
their fates lay in undisturbed piles in the rooms of the prison
office. And the assignment supervisors took the files from the par-
ticular corner where it was easiest to get at them. And some zeks
had to spend two or three months gasping in this accursed Presnya
while others would whiz through it with the speed of a shooting
star. As a result of all that congestion, haste, and disorder with
the cases, sometimes sentences got switched at Presnya (and at
other transit prisons as well). This didn’t affect the 58’s, because
their prison terms, in Maxim Gorky’s phrase, were “Terms” with
a capital letter, were intended to be long, and even when they
seemed to be nearing their end they just never got there anyway.
But it made sense for big thieves and murderers to switch with
some stupid nonpolitical offender. And so they or their accom-
plices would inch up to such an individual and question him with
interest and concern. And he, not knowing that a short-termer
at a transit prison isn’t supposed to disclose anything about him-
self, would innocently tell them that his name was, for example,
Vasily Parfenych Yevrashkin, that he was born in 1913, that he
lived in Semidubye and had been born there. And his term was
one year, Article 109, “Negligence.” And then Yevrashkin was

The Ports of the Archipelago | 561

asleep or maybe not even asleep, but there was such a racket in
the cell and there was such a crowd at the swill trough in the door
that he couldn’t make his way there and listen, while on the other
side of it in the corridor they were rapidly muttering a list of
names for a prisoner transport. Some of the names were shouted
from the door into the cell, but not Yevrashkin’s because hardly
had the name been read out in the corridor than an urka, a thief,
had obsequiously (and they can be obsequious when it’s neces-
sary) shoved up his snout and answered quickly and quietly:
“Vasily Parfenych, born 1913, village of Semidubye, 109, one
year,” and ran off to get his things. The real Yevrashkin yawned,
lay back on his bunk, and patiently waited to be called the next
day, and the next week, and the next month, and then he made so
bold as to bother the prison superintendent: why hadn’t he been
taken in a prisoner transport? (And every day in all the cells
they kept calling out the name of some Zvyaga.) And when a
month later or a half-year later they got around to combing
through all the cases by calling the roll, what they had left was
just one file—belonging to Zvyaga, a multiple offender, sentenced
for a double murder and robbing a store, ten years—and one shy
prisoner who was trying to tell everybody that he was Yevrashkin,
although you couldn’t make anything out from the photo, and so
he damn well was Zvyaga and he had to be tucked away in a
penalty camp, Ivdellag—because otherwise it would have been
necessary to confess that the transit prison had made a mistake.
(And as for that other Yevrashkin who had been sent off on a
prisoner transport, you wouldn’t even be able to find where he had
gone—because none of the lists were left. And anyway he had
only had a one-year term and had been sent to do farm work with-
out being under guard and got three days off his sentence for
every day he worked, or else he had simply run away, and was
long since home or, more likely, was already imprisoned again on
a new sentence.) There were also eccentrics who sold their short
terms for a kilo or two of fat bacon. They figured that in any
case the authorities would check up and establish their correct
identities. And sometimes they did.*°

10. And, as P. Yakubovich writes in reference to the so-called “cadgers,”
the sale of prison terms took place in the last century too. It is an ancient
prison trick.

562 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

During the years when the prisoners’ cases didn’t carry any
indication of their final destination, the transit prisons turned into
slave markets. The most desired guests at the transit prisons were
the buyers. This word was heard more and more often in the
corridors and cells and was used without any shadow of irony.
Just as it became intolerable everywhere in industry simply to sit
and wait until things were sent from the center on the basis of
allocations, and it was more satisfactory to send one’s own
“pushers” and “pullers” to get things done—the same thing hap-
pened in Gulag: the natives on the islands kept dying off; and
even though they cost not one ruble, a count was kept of them,
and one had to worry about getting more of them for oneself so
there wouldn’t be any failure in fulfilling the plan. The buyers had
to be sharp, have good eyes, and look carefully to see what they
were taking so that last-leggers and invalids didn’t get shoved
off on them. The buyers who picked a transport on the basis of
case files were poor buyers. The conscientious merchants de-
manded that the merchandise be displayed alive and bare-skinned
for them to inspect. And that was just what they used to say—
without smiling—merchandise. “Well, what merchandise have
you brought?” asked a buyer at the Butyrki station, observing
and inspecting the female attributes of seventeen-year-old Ira
Kalina.

Human nature, if it changes at all, changes not much faster
than the geological face of the earth. And the very same sensa-
tions of curiosity, relish, and sizing up which slave-traders felt
at the slave-girl markets twenty-five centuries ago of course pos-
sessed the Gulag bigwigs in the Usman Prison in 1947, when they,
a couple of dozen men in MVD uniform, sat at several desks
covered with sheets (this was for their self-importance, since it
would have seemed awkward otherwise), and all the women
prisoners were made to undress in the box next door and to walk
in front of them bare-footed and bare-skinned, turn around, stop,
and answer questions. “Drop your hands,” they ordered those
who had adopted the defensive pose of classic sculpture. (After
all, these officers were very seriously selecting bedmates for them-
selves and their colleagues. )

And so it was that for the new prisoner various manifestations
foreshadowed the camp battle of the morrow and cast their pall
over the innocent spiritual joys of the transit prison.

The Ports of the Archipelago | 563

For just two nights they put a special-assignment prisoner in
our cell in Krasnaya Presnya. And he was next to me in the bunk.
He traveled about with special-assignment orders, which meant
that an invoice had been filled out in Central Administration in-
dicating that he was a construction technician and could be used
only in that capacity in his new location, and this went with him
from camp to camp. The special-assignment prisoner was travel-
ing in the common Stolypin cars and was kept in the common
cells of the transit prisons, but he wasn’t nervous; he was pro-
tected by his personal document, and he wouldn’t be driven out
to fell timber. A cruel and determined expression was the prin-
cipal trait of this camp veteran’s face. He had already served out
the greater part of his term. (And I did not yet realize that this
exact expression would in time etch itself on all our faces, because
a cruel and determined expression is the national hallmark of the
Gulag islanders. People with soft, conciliatory expressions die out
quickly on the islands.) He observed our naive floundering with
an ironic smile, just as people look at two-week-old puppies.

What should we expect in camp? Taking pity on us, he taught
us:

“From your very first step in camp everyone will try to deceive
and plunder you. Trust no one but yourself. Look around quickly:
someone may be sneaking up on you to bite you. Eight years ago
I arrived at Kargopollag just as innocent and just as naive as you
are now. They unloaded us from two trains, and the convoy pre-
pared to lead us the six miles to the camp through the deep,
crumbly snow. Three sleds came up beside us. Some hefty chap
whom the convoy didn’t interfere with came over to us and said:
‘Brothers, put your things on the sleds and we will carry them
there for you.” We remembered reading in books that prisoners’
belongings were carried on carts. And we thought: It isn’t going
to be all that inhuman in camp; they are concerned about us.
And we loaded our things on the sleds. They left. And we never
saw them again, not even an empty wrapper.”

“But how can that happen? Isn’t there any law there?”

“Don’t ask idiotic questions. There is a law there. The law of
the taiga, of the jungle. But as for justice—there never has been
any in Gulag and there never will be. That Kargopol incident
was simply a symbol of Gulag. And you have to get used to some-
thing else too: in camp no one ever does anything for nothing, no

564 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

one ever does anything out of the generosity of his heart. You
have to pay for everything. If someone proposes something to
you that is unselfish, disinterested, you can be sure it’s a dirty
trick, a provocation. The main thing is: avoid general-assignment
work, Avoid it from the day you arrive. If you land in general-
assignment work that first day, then you are lost, and this time
for keeps.”

“General-assignment work?”

“General-assignment work—that is the main and basic work
performed in any given camp. Eighty percent of the prisoners
work at it, and they all die off. All. And then they bring new ones
in to take their places and they again are sent to general-assign-
ment work. Doing this work, you expend the last of your strength.
And you are always hungry. And always wet. And shoeless. And
you are given short rations and short everything else. And put in
the worst barracks. And they won’t give you any treatment when
you're ill. The only ones who survive in camps are those who
try at any price not to be put on general-assignment work. From
the first day.”

“At any price?”

“At any price!”

At Krasnaya Presnya I assimilated and accepted this alto-
gether unexaggerated advice of the cruel special-assignment pris-
oner, forgetting only to ask him one thing: How do you measure
that price? How high do you go?

Chapter 3

The Slave Caravans

It was painful to travel in a Stolypin, unbearable in a Black
Maria, and the transit prison would soon wear you down—and
it might just be better to skip the whole lot and go straight to
camp in the red cattle cars.

As always, the interests of the state and the interests of the
individual coincided here. It was also to the state’s advantage to
dispatch sentenced prisoners straight to the camps by direct
routing and thus avoid overloading the city trunk-line railroads,
automotive transport, and transit-camp personnel. They had long
since grasped this fact in Gulag, and it had been taken to heart:
witness the caravans of red cows (red cattle cars), the caravans
of barges, and, where there were no rails and no water, the cara-
vans on foot (after all, prisoners could not be allowed to exploit
the labor of horses and camels).

The red trains were always a help when the courts in some
particular place were working swiftly or the transit facilities were
overcrowded. It was possible in this way to dispatch a large
number of prisoners in one batch. That is how the millions of
peasants were transported in 1929—1931. That is how they exiled
Leningrad from Leningrad. That is how they populated the
Kolyma in the thirties: every day Moscow, the capital of our
country, belched out one such train to Sovetskaya Gavan, to
Vanino Port. And each provincial capital also sent off red train-
loads, but not on a daily schedule. That is how they removed the
Volga German Republic to Kazakhstan in 1941, and later all

565

566 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

the rest of the exiled nations were sent off in the same way. In
1945 Russia’s prodigal sons and daughters were sent from Ger-
many, from Czechoslovakia, from Austria, and simply from west-
ern border areas—whoever had gotten there on his own—in such
trains as these. In 1949 that is how they collected the 58’s in
Special Camps.

The Stolypins follow routine railroad schedules. And the red
trains travel on imposing waybills, signed by important Gulag
generals. The Stolypins cannot go to an empty site, to “nowhere”;
their destination must always be a station, even if it’s in some
nasty little two-bit town with some preliminary detention cells
in an attic. But the red trains can go into emptiness: and wherever
one does go, there immediately rises right next to it, out of the sea
of the steppe or the sea of the taiga, a new island of the Archi-
pelago.

Not every red cattle car is ready as is to transport prisoners.
First it has to be prepared. But not in the sense some of our
readers might expect: that the coal or lime it carried before it
was assigned to carry people has to be swept out and the car
cleaned—that isn’t always done. Nor in the sense that it needs
to be calked and have a stove installed if it is winter. (When the
section of the railroad from Knyazh-Pogost to Ropcha was being
built and wasn’t yet part of the general railroad network, they
immediately began to transport prisoners on it—in freight cars
without either stoves or bunks. In winter the zeks lay on the icy,
snowy floor and weren’t even given any hot food, because the
train could make it all the way through this section in less than
a day. Whoever can in imagination lie there like them and survive
those eighteen to twenty hours shall indeed survive! Here is what
was involved in preparing a red cattle car for prisoners: The
floors, walls, and ceilings had to be tested for strength and
checked for holes or faults. Their small windows had to be barred.
A hole had to be cut in the floor to serve as a drain, and specially
protected by sheet iron firmly nailed down all around it. The
necessary number of platforms on which convoy guards would
stand with machine guns had to be evenly distributed throughout
the train, and if there were too few, more had to be built. Access
to the roofs of the cars had to be provided. Sites for searchlights
had to be selected and supplied with uninterrupted electric power.

The Slave Caravans | 567

Long-handled wooden mallets had to be procured. A passenger
car had to be hooked on for the staff, and if there wasn’t one,
then instead heated freight cars had to be prepared for the chief
of convoy, the Security officer, and the convoy. Kitchens had to
be built—for the convoy and for the prisoners. And only after
all this had been done was it all right to walk along the cattle
cars and chalk on the sides: “Special Equipment” or “Perishable
Goods.” (In her chapter, “The Seventh Car,” Yevgeniya Ginz-
burg described a transport of red cars very vividly, and her de-
scription largely obviates the necessity of presenting details here. )

The preparation of the train has been completed—and ahead
lies the complicated combat operation of loading the prisoners
into the cars. At this point there are two important and obligatory
objectives:

e to conceal the loading from ordinary citizens
e to terrorize the prisoners

To conceal the loading from the local population was necessary
because approximately a thousand people were being loaded on
the train simultaneously (at least twenty-five cars), and this
wasn’t your little group from a Stolypin that could be led right
past the townspeople. Everyone knew, of course, that arrests
were being made every day and every hour, but no one was to be
horrified by the sight of large numbers of them together. In Orel
in 1938 you could hardly hide the fact that there was no home in
the city where there hadn’t been arrests, and weeping women in
their peasant carts blocked the square in front of the Orel Prison
just as in Surikov’s painting The Execution of the Streltsy. (Oh,
who one day will paint this latter-day tragedy for us? But no one
will. It’s not fashionable, not fashionable. . . .) But you don’t
need to show our Soviet people an entire trainload of them col-
lected in one day. (And in Orel that year there were.) And young
people mustn’t see it either—for young people are our future.
Therefore it was done only at night—and every night, too, each
and every night, and that was the way it went for several months.
The black line of prisoners to be transported was driven from the
prison to the station on foot. (Meanwhile the Black Marias were
busy making new arrests.) True, the women realized, the women
somehow found out, and at night they came to the station from

568 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

all over the city and kept watch over the trains on the siding.
They ran along the cars, tripping over the ties and rails, and
shouting at every car: “Is So-and-so in there?” “Is So-and-so in
there?” And they ran on to the next one, and others ran up to
this one: “Is So-and-so in there?” And suddenly an answer would
come from the sealed car: “I’m in here. I’m here!” Or else: “Keep
looking for him. He’s in another car.” Or else: “Women! Listen!
My wife is somewhere out there, near the station. Run and tell
her.” l

These scenes, unworthy of our contemporary world, testify
only to the then inept organization of train embarkations. The
mistakes were noted, and after a certain night the trains were
surrounded in depth by cordons of snarling and barking police
dogs.

And in Moscow, the loading into red cattle cars from the old
Sretenka Transit Prison (which prisoners no longer remember) or
from Krasnaya Presnya took place only at night; that was the
rule.

However, although the convoy had no use for the superfluous
light of the sun by day, on the other hand they made use of suns
by night—the searchlights. They were more efficient since they
could be concentrated on the necessary area, where the prisoners
were seated on the earth in a frightened pack awaiting the com-
mand: “Next unit of five—stand up! To the car—on the run!”
(Only on the run, so as not to have time to look around, to think
things over, to run as though chased by the dogs, afraid of noth-
ing so much as falling down.) On that uneven path. Up the load-
ing ramp, scrambling. And clear, hostile searchlight beams not
only provided light but were an important theatrical element in
terrorizing the prisoners, along with yells, threats, gunstock blows
on those who fell behind, and the order: “Sit down.” (And some-
times, as in the station square of that same Orel: “Down on
your knees.” And like some new breed of believers at prayer, the
whole thousand would get down on their knees.) Along with that
running to the car, quite unnecessary except for intimidation—
for which it was very important. Along with the enraged barking
of the dogs. Along with the leveled gun barrels (rifles or auto-
matic pistols, depending on the decade). And the main thing was
to undermine, to crush the prisoner’s will power so he wouldn’t

The Slave Caravans | 569

think of trying to escape, so that for a long time he wouldn’t
notice his new advantage: the fact that he had exchanged a stone-
walled prison for a railroad car with thin plank walls.

But in order to load one thousand prisoners into railroad cars
at night so precisely, the prison had to start jerking them out of
their cells and processing them for transport the morning before,
and the convoy had to spend the entire day on a long-drawn-out
and strict procedure of checking them in while still in prison and
then holding those who’d been checked in for long hours, not, of
course, in the cells by now, but in the courtyard, on the ground,
so as not to mix them up with the prisoners still belonging in
the prison. Thus for the prisoner the loading at night was only a
relief after a whole day of torment.

Besides the ordinary counts, verifications, hair clipping, cloth-
ing roasting, and baths, the core of the preparation for the pri-
soner transport was general frisking. This search was carried
out not by the prison but by the convoy receiving the prisoners.
The convoy was expected, in accordance with the directives re-
garding the red transports and in accordance with their own
operational requirements, to carry out this search so that the
prisoners would not be left in possession of anything that might
help them to escape; to take away: everything that could saw
or cut; all powders (tooth powder, sugar, salt, tobacco, tea) so
they could not be used to blind the convoy; all string, cord, twine,
belts, and straps because they could all be used in escaping (and
that meant all kinds of straps! and so they cut off the straps which
held up the artificial limb of a one-legged man—and the cripple
had to carry his artificial leg on his shoulder and hop with the
help of those on either side of him). The rest of the things—all
“valuables” and suitcases too—were, according to instructions,
supposed to be checked and carried in a special baggage car and
returned to their owners at the end of the journey.

Yet the power of the Moscow directive was weak and might
be ignored by the Vologda or the Kuibyshev convoy, while the
power of the convoy over the prisoners was very corporeal, very
real. And this fact was crucial to the third objective of the load-
ing operation:

e in simple justice to take all the good things they possess
from enemies of the people for the use of its sons

570 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

“Sit down.” “On your knees!” “Strip!” In these statutory orders
of the convoy lay the basic power one could not argue with. After
all, a naked person loses his self-assurance. He cannot straighten
up proudly and speak as an equal to people who are still clothed.
A search begins. (Kuibyshev, summer of 1949.) Naked prisoners
approach, carrying their possessions and the clothes they've
taken off. A mass of armed soldiers surrounds them. It doesn’t
look as though they are going to be led to a prisoner transport but
as though they are going to be shot immediately or put to death
in a gas chamber—and in that mood a human being ceases to
concern himself with his possessions. The convoy does every-
thing with intentional brusqueness, rudely, sharply, not speaking
one word in an ordinary human voice. After all, the purpose is to
terrify and dishearten. Suitcases are shaken apart, and things fall
all over the floor and are then stacked up in separate piles. Ciga-
rette cases, billfolds, and other pitiful “valuables” are all taken
away and thrown without any identifying marks into a barrel
that is standing nearby. (And, for some reason, the fact that this
particular receptacle isn’t a safe, or a trunk, or a box, but a
barrel particularly depresses the naked prisoners there, and it
seems so terribly futile to protest.) The naked prisoner has all
he can do simply to snatch up his well-searched rags from the
floor and knot them together or tie them up in a blanket. Felt
boots? You can check them, throw them over there, sign for them
on the list! (You aren’t the one who gets the receipt, but you are
the one who signs for having surrendered them, certifying that
you threw them onto the pile!) And when at dusk the last truck
leaves the prison yard with the prisoners, they see the convoy
guards rushing to grab the best leather suitcases from the pile
and select the best cigarette cases from the barrel. And after them,
the jailers scurry for their booty, too, and last of all the transit
prison trusties.

That is what it cost to spend one day to get to the cattle car.
And now the prisoners have clambered with relief up onto the
splintered planks of the bunks. But what kind of relief is this,
what kind of heated cattle car is this? Once again they are
squeezed in a nutcracker between cold and starvation, between
the thieves and the convoy.

The Slave Caravans | 571

If there are thieves in a cattle car (and they are, of course, not
kept separate in the red trains either) they take the best places,
as is traditional—on the upper bunks by the window. That's
in summer. So we can guess where their places are in winter. Next
to the stove, of course, in a tight ring around the stove. As the
former thief Minayev recalls: in 1949, during a severe cold
wave, they were issued only three pails of coal for their car for
the entire journey from Voronezh to Kotlas, lasting several days.*
And in this crisis, the thieves not only occupied the places around
the stove, and not only took all the suckers’ warm things away
from them and put them on, but didn’t even hesitate to take their
footcloths out of their shoes and wind them around their own
feet. You today, me tomorrow. It was somewhat worse with food
—the thieves took charge of the whole ration for the car and
then kept the best for themselves along with whatever else they
needed. Loshchilin recalls a three-day prisoner transport from
Moscow to Perebory in 1937. They didn’t cook anything hot on
the train for such a short journey and handed out only dry ra-
tions. The thieves took the best for themselves but gave the
others permission to divide up the bread and the herring; and that
meant they weren’t hungry. When the ration was hot and the
thieves were in charge of distributing it, they divided up the gruel
among themselves. (A three-week transport from Kishinev to
Pechora in 1945.) With all this, the thieves didn’t scruple to
engage also in plain and simple robbery en route: they noticed
an Estonian’s gold teeth and they pushed him down and knocked
out the teeth with a poker.

The zeks considered the hot food the real advantage of the
red trains: at remote stations (again where people couldn’t see
them) the trains stopped and gruel and porridge were doled out
to the cars. But they even managed to give out the hot food in
such a way that things went wrong. They might (as on that same
Kishinev train) pour out the gruel in the same pails in which
they issued coal—there being nothing to wash them out with.
Because drinking water was also rationed on the train and was
in even shorter supply than gruel. And so you gulped down the
gruel, your teeth gritting on pieces of coal. Or they brought the
gruel and the hot cereal to the car and didn’t issue enough bowls

1. In a letter to me in the Literaturnaya Gazeta, November 29, 1963.

572 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

—twenty-five instead of forty—and promptly ordered: “Come on,
come on, faster, faster. We have other cars to feed too, not just
you.” How then could you eat, how could you divide it up? You
couldn’t dish it out equitably on the basis of bowls, and that
meant you had to estimate each portion so as not to give out too
much. And those to be served first would shout: “Stir it! Stir it!”
And the last kept silent: there would be more on the bottom. The
first were eating and the last waiting. They would have liked the
others to eat faster, because they were hungry, and meanwhile the
gruel would be getting cold in the barrel and they were also
being hurried from outside: “Well, have you finished? Come on
now, get a move on!” And then they served the second contingent
—not more and not less and not thicker and not thinner than the
first. And then came estimating the leftovers correctly and pour-
ing them out two portions to a bowl. And all this time forty
people don’t so much eat as watch the sharing out and suffer.
They don’t heat the car, they don’t protect the other prisoners
from the thieves, they don’t give you enough to drink, and they
don’t give you enough to eat—but on the other hand they don’t
let you sleep either. During the day the convoy can see the whole
train very clearly and the tracks behind them, and can be sure
that no one has jumped out the side or slipped down on the rails.
But at night vigilance possesses them. With long-handled wooden
mallets (the standard Gulag equipment) they knock resoundingly
on every board of the car at every stop: maybe someone has
sawed through it. And at certain stops the door of the car is
thrown open. The light of the lantern or the beam of the search-
light: “Checkup!” And this means: Get on your feet and be
ready to go where they tell you—everyone run to the left or to
the right. The convoy guards jump inside with their mallets
(others have ranged themselves in a semicircle outside with auto-
matic pistols), and they point: to the left! That means that those
on the left are in place and those on the right must get over there
on the jump like fleas hopping over each other and landing where
they can. And whoever isn’t nimble, whoever gets caught day-
dreaming, gets whacked on the ribs and back with the mallets to |
give him more energy. And by this time the convoy jackboots are
already trampling your pauper’s pallet and all your lousy duds
are being thrown in every direction and everywhere there are

The Slave Caravans | 573

lights and hammering: Have you sawed through any place? No.
Then the convoy guards stand in the middle and begin to shift
you from left to right, counting: “First... second... third.” It
would be quite enough to count simply with a wave of the finger,
but if that were done, it wouldn’t be terrifying, and so it is more
vivid, less subject to error, more energetic and faster, to beat out
that count with the same mallet on your ribs, shoulders, heads,
wherever it happens to land. They have counted up to forty. So
now they will go about their tossing, lighting up, and hammering
at the other end of the car. It’s all over finally and the car is locked
up. You can go back to sleep till the next stop. (And one can’t
really say that the anxiety of the convoy guard is entirely un-
founded—because those who know how can escape from the red
cattle cars. For instance, they knock on a board to test it and
find it has been partially sawed through. Or suddenly in the
morning, when the gruel is being distributed, they see that there
are several shaved faces among the unshaven ones. And they
surround the car with their automatic pistols: “Hand over your
knives!” And this is really just petty bravado on the part of
the thieves and their allies: they got tired of being unshaven, and
now they are going to have to turn in their razor.)

The red train differs from other long-distance trains in that
those who have embarked on it do not know whether or not they
will disembark. When they unloaded a trainload from the Lenin-
grad prisons (1942) in Solikamsk, the entire embankment was
covered with corpses, and only a few got there alive. In the
winters of 1944—1945 and 1945-1946 in the village of Zhelez-
nodorozhny (Knyazh-Pogost), as in all the main rail junctions
in the North, the prisoner trains from liberated territories (the
Baltic states, Poland, Germany) arrived with one or two car-
loads of corpses tacked on behind. That meant that en route they
had carefully taken the corpses out of the cars that contained
the living passengers and put them in the dead cars. But not
always. There were many occasions when they found out who was
still alive and who was dead only when they opened up the car
after arriving at the Sukhobezvodnaya (Unzhlag) Station. Those
who didn’t come out were dead.

It was terrifying and deadly to travel this way in winter be-
cause the convoy, with all its bother about security, wasn’t able

574 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

to haul coal for twenty-five stoves. But it wasn’t so cushy to travel
this way in hot weather either. Two of the four tiny windows were
tightly sealed and the car roof would overheat and the convoy
wasn’t about to exert itself in hauling water for a thousand prison-
ers—after all, they couldn’t even manage to give just one Stolypin
car enough to drink. The prisoners considered April and Sep-
tember the best months for transports. But even the best of sea-
sons was too short if the train was en route for three months.
(Leningrad to Vladivostok in 1935.) And if such a long trip is in
prospect, then arrangements have been made for both political
indoctrination of the convoy soldiers and spiritual care of the
imprisoned souls: in a separate railroad car attached to such a
train travels a “godfather”—a Security officer. He has made his
preparations for the prisoner-transport train back in prison, and
prisoners are assigned to cars not simply at random but accord-
ing to lists he has validated. He is the one who appoints the
monitor in each car and who has instructed and assigned a stool
pigeon to each. At long stops he finds some pretext for sum-
moning both from the car and asks what the people are talking
about in there. And any such Security chief would be ashamed
to finish the journey without signed and sealed results. And so
right there en route he puts someone under interrogation, and lo
and behold! by the time they reach their destination, the prisoner
has been handed a new prison term.

No, damn that red cattle car train too, even though it did carry
the prisoners straight to their destination without changing trains.
Anyone who has ever been in one will never forget it. Just as well
get to camp sooner! Just as well arrive sooner.

A human being is all hope and impatience. As if the Security
officer in camp will be any more humane or the stoolies any less
unscrupulous. It’s just the other way around. As if they won't
force us to the ground with those same threats and those same
police dogs when we arrive: “Sit down!” As if there will be
less snow on the ground in camp than what has sifted through
into the cattle cars. As if it means that we’ve already gotten to
where we’re going when they begin to unload us and won’t be
carried farther in open flatcars on a narrow-gauge track. (And
how can they carry us in open flatcars? How can we be kept under
guard? That’s a problem for the convoy. And here is how they

The Slave Caravans | 575

do it: They order us to lie down all huddled together and they
cover us with one big tarpaulin, like the sailors in the motion
picture Potemkin before they’re to be executed. And say thank
you for the tarpaulin too. In the North, in October, Olenyev and
his comrades had the luck to have to sit in open flatcars all day
long. They had already embarked, but no locomotive had come.
First it rained. Then it froze. And the zeks’ rags froze on them.)
The tiny train will jerk and toss as it moves, and the sides of
the flatcar will begin to crack and break, and the bouncing will
hurl someone off the car and under the wheels. And here is a
riddle: If one is traveling sixty miles from Dudinka through Arctic
frost in open flatcars on the narrow-gauge track, then where are
the thieves going to be? Answer: In the middle of each flatcar,
so the livestock around them will keep them warm and keep
them from falling under the train themselves. Right answer!
Question: What will the zeks see at the end of this narrow-gauge
track (1939)? Will there be any buildings there? No, not a one.
Any dugouts? Yes, but already occupied, not for them. And does
that mean that the first thing they do will be to dig themselves
dugouts? No, because how can they dig in the Arctic winter?
Instead, they will be sent out to mine metal. And where will they
live? What—live? Oh, yes, live . . . They will live in tents.

But will there always be a narrow-gauge track? No, of course
not. The train arrived: Yertsovo Station, February, 1938. The
railroad cars were opened up at night. Bonfires were lit along-
side the train and disembarkation took place by their light; then
a count-off, forming up, and a count-off again. The temperature
was 32 degrees below zero Centigrade. The prisoners’ transport
train had come from the Donbas, and all the prisoners had been
arrested back in the summer and were wearing low shoes, ox-
fords, even sandals. They tried to warm themselves at the fires, but
the guards chased them away: that’s not what the fires were there
for; they were there to give light. Fingers grew numb almost
instantly. The snow filled the thin shoes and didn’t even melt.
There was no mercy and the order was given: “Fall in! Form
up! One step to the right or left and we’ll fire without warning.
Forward march!” The dogs on their chains howled at their favor-
ite command, at the excitement of the moment. The convoy
guards marched ahead in their sheepskin coats—and the doomed

576 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

prisoners in their summer clothes marched through deep snow
on a totally untraveled road somewhere into the dark taiga, nary
a light ahead. The northern lights gleamed—for them it was their
first and probably their last view of them. The fir trees crackled
in the frost. The ill-shod prisoners paced and trod down the
snow, their feet and legs growing numb from the cold.

Or, as another example, here is a January, 1945, arrival at
Pechora. (“Our armies have captured Warsaw! Our armies have
cut off East Prussia!” ) An empty snowy field. The prisoners were
tossed out of the cars, made to sit down in the snow by sixes,
painstakingly counted off, miscounted, and counted again. They
were ordered to stand up and then were harried through a snowy
virgin waste for four miles. This prisoner transport was also from
the south—from Moldavia. And everyone was wearing leather
shoes. The police dogs were right on their heels, and the dogs
pushed the zeks in the last row with their paws on their backs,
breathing on the backs of their heads. (Two priests were in that
row—old gray-haired Father Fyodor Florya and young Father
Viktor Shipovalnikov, who was helping to hold him up.) What
a use for police dogs? No, what self-restraint it showed on the
dogs’ part! After all, they wanted to bite so badly!

Finally they arrived. There was a camp reception bath; they
had to undress in one cabin, run across the yard naked, and wash
in another. But all this was bearable now: the worst was over.
They had arrived. Twilight fell. And all of a sudden it was learned
there was no room for them; the camp wasn’t ready to receive the
prisoner transport. And after the bath, the prisoners were again
formed up, counted, surrounded by dogs, and were marched back
to their prisoner-transport train all those four miles, but this time
in the dark. And the car doors had been left open all those hours,
and had lost even their earlier, pitiful measure of warmth, and
then all the coal had been burned up by the end of the journey
and there was nowhere to get any more now. And in these
circumstances, they froze all night and in the morning were
given dried carp (and anyone who wanted to drink could chew
snow), and then marched back along the same road again.

And this, after all, was an episode with a happy ending. In this
case, the camp at least existed. If it couldn’t accept them today,
it would tomorrow. But it was not at all unusual for the red trains

The Slave Caravans | 577

to arrive nowhere, and the end of the journey often marked the
opening day of a new camp. They might simply stop somewhere
in the taiga under the northern lights and nail to a fir tree a sign
reading: “FIRST OLP.”? And there they would chew on dried fish
for a week and try to mix their flour with snow.

But if a camp had been set up there even two weeks earlier,
that already spelled comfort; hot food would have been cooked;
and even if there were no bowls, the first and second courses
would nonetheless be mixed together in washbasins for six prison-
ers to eat from at the same time; and this group of six would form
a circle (there were no tables or chairs yet), and two of them
would hold onto the handles of the washbasin with their left
hands and would eat with their right hands, taking turns. Am I
repeating myself? No, this was Perebory in 1937, as reported by
Loshchilin. It is not I who am repeating myself, but Gulag.

Next they would assign the newcomers brigade leaders from
among the camp veterans, who would quickly teach them to live,
to make do, to submit to discipline, and to cheat. And from their
very first morning, they would march off to work because the
chimes of the clock of the great Epoch were striking and could
not wait. The Soviet Union is not, after all, some Tsarist hard-
labor Akatui for you, where prisoners got three days’ rest after
they arrived.

Gradually the economy of the Archipelago prospered. New rail-
road branch lines were built. And soon they were transporting
prisoners by train to many places that had been reached only by
water not long before. But there are natives of the Archipelago
still alive who can tell you how they went down the Izhma River
in genuine ancient Russian river galleys, one hundred to a boat,
and the prisoners themselves did the rowing. They can tell you
how they traveled in fishing smacks down the northern rivers
of Ukhta, Usa, and Pechora to their native camp. Zeks were
shipped to Vorkuta in barges: on large barges to Adzvavom,

2. OLP = Otdelny Lagerny Punkt = Separate Camp Site.
3. P. F. Yakubovich, V Mire Otverzhennykh.

578 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

where there was a transshipping point for Vorkutlag, and from
there only a stone’s throw, let’s say, to Ust-Usa, on a flat-bottomed
barge for ten days. The whole barge was alive with lice, and the
convoy allowed the prisoners to go up on deck one by one and
brush the parasites off into the water. The river transports did not
proceed directly to their destination either, but were sometimes
interrupted to transfer for transshipment, or for portage, or for
stretches covered on foot.

And they had their own transit prisons in this area—built out
of poles or tents—Ust-Usa, Pomozdino, Shchelya-Yur, where
they had their own special system of regulations. They had their
own convoy rules, and of course, their own special commands, and
their own special convoy tricks, and their own special methods
of tormenting the zeks. But it’s already clear that it is not our task
to describe those particular exotica, so we won’t even begin.

The Northern Dvina, the Ob, and the Yenisei know when they
began to haul prisoners in barges—during the liquidation of the
“kulaks.” These rivers flowed straight north, and their barges
were potbellied and capacious—and it was the only way they
could cope with the task of carting all this gray mass from living
Russia to the dead North. People were thrown into the trough-
like holds and lay there in piles or crawled around like crabs in
a basket. And high up on the deck, as though atop a cliff, stood
guards. Sometimes they transported this mass out in the open
without any cover, and sometimes they covered it with a big
tarpaulin—in order not to look at it, or to guard it better, but
certainly not to keep off the rain. The journey in such a barge was
no longer prisoner transport, but simply death on the installment
plan. Anyway, they gave them hardly anything to eat. Then they
tossed them out in the tundra—and there they didn’t give them
anything at all to eat. They just left them there to die, alone with
nature.

Prisoner transport by barge on the Northern Dvina (and on the
Vychegda) had not died out even by 1940. That was how A. Y.
Olenyev was transported. Prisoners in the hold stood tightly
jammed against each other, and not just for a day either. They
urinated in glass jars which were passed from hand to hand and
emptied through the porthole. And anything more substantial
went right in their pants.

The Slave Caravans | 579

Barge transport on the Yenisei came to be a regular and
permanent feature for whole decades. In Krasnoyarsk in the
thirties, open-sided sheds were built on the bank, and in the cold
Siberian winters the prisoners would shiver there for a day or
two while they waited for transportation.* The Yenisei prisoner-
transport barges were permanently equipped with dark holds
three decks deep. The only light was what filtered in through the
companionway for the ship’s ladder. The convoy lived in a little
cabin on deck. Sentries kept watch over the exits from the hold
and over the river to make sure that no one escaped by swimming.
They didn’t go down into the hold, no matter what groans and
howls for help might come from there. And the prisoners were
never taken up on deck for fresh air. In the prisoner transports
of 1937 and 1938, and 1944 and 1945 (and we can guess it must
have been the same in the interval), no medical assistance what-
ever was provided in the hold. The prisoners lay there lined up
in two rows, one with their heads toward the side of the barge
and the heads of the other row at their feet. The only way to get
to the latrine barrels was to walk over them. The latrine barrels
were not always emptied in time (imagine lugging that barrel
full of sewage up the steep ship’s ladder to the deck). They
overflowed, and the contents spilled along the deck and seeped
down on those below. And people lay there. They were fed
gruel from casks hauled along the deck. The servers were prison-
ers too, and there, in the eternal darkness (today, perhaps, there
is electricity), by the light of a portable “Bat” kerosene lamp,
they ladled out the food. Such a prisoner transport to Dudinka
sometimes took a month. (Nowadays, of course, they can do it
in a week.) It sometimes happened that the trip dragged out much
longer because of sand bars and other hazards of river travel, and
they wouldn’t have enough food with them, in which case they
just stopped giving out the food for several days at a time. (And
later on, of course, they never made up for the days they missed. )

At this point the alert reader can without the author’s help
add that the thieves were on the upper level inside the hold and
closer to the ship’s ladder—in other words, to light and air. They
had what access they required to the distribution of the bread

4, And V. I. Lenin in 1897 boarded the St. Nicholas in the passenger port
like a free person.

580 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

ration, and if the trip in question was a hard one, they didn’t
hesitate to whip away the holy crutch (in other words, they took
the gray cattle’s rations from them). The thieves whiled away the
long journey playing cards, and they made their own decks.” They
got the stakes for their card games by frisking the suckers, search-
ing everyone lying in a particular section of the barge. For a
certain length of time they won and lost and rewon and relost
their loot, and then it floated up to the convoy. Yes, the reader
has now guessed everything: the thieves had the convoy on the
hook; the convoy either kept the stolen things for themselves or
sold them at the wharves and brought the thieves something to
eat in exchange.

And what about resistance? It happened—but only rarely.
One case has been preserved. In 1950 on such a barge as I have
described, except that it was larger—a seagoing barge en route
from Vladivostok to Sakhalin—seven unarmed 58’s resisted the
thieves (in this case bitches), who numbered about eighty in all
(some with knives, as usual). These bitches had searched the
whole transport back at Vladivostok transit point three-ten, and
they had searched it very thoroughly, in no way less efficiently
than the jailers; they knew all the hiding places, but no search
can ever turn up everything. Aware of this, when they were al-
ready in the hold they treacherously announced: “Whoever has
money can buy makhorka.” And Misha Grachev got out three
rubles he had hidden in his quilted jacket. And the bitch Volodka
Tatarin shouted at him: “You crowbait, why don’t you pay your
taxes?” And he rushed in to take it away. But Master Sergeant
Pavel (whose last name has not been recorded) pushed him
away. Volodka Tatarin aimed a slingshot—a “V” fork—at
Pavel’s eyes, and Pavel knocked him off his feet. Immediately
twenty to thirty bitches moved in on him. And around Grachev
and Pavel gathered Volodya Shpakov, a former army captain,
Seryezha Potapov, Volodya Reunov, a former army sergeant,
Volodya Tretyukin, another former sergeant, and Vasa Krav-
tsov. And what happened? The whole thing ended after only a few
blows had been exchanged. This may have been a matter of the
age-old and very real cowardice of the thieves (always concealed
behind feigned toughness and devil-may-care insolence); or else

5. V. Shalamov tells about this in detail in his Ocherki prestupnogo mira
(Sketches of the Criminal World).

The Slave Caravans | 581

the proximity of the guard held them back (this being right
beneath the hatchway). Or it may have been that on this trip
they were saving themselves for a more important social task—to
seize control of the Aleksandrovsk Transit Prison (the one
Chekhov described) and a Sakhalin construction project (seizing
control of it, of course, not in order to construct) before the
honest thieves could; at any rate they pulled back, restricting
themselves to the threat: “On dry land we'll make garbage out
of you!” (The battle never took place, and no one made “garbage”
out of the boys. And at the Aleksandrovsk transit point the
bitches met with misfortune: it was already firmly held by the
honest thieves.)

In steamships to the Kolyma everything was the same as on the
barges except that everything was on a larger scale. Strange as it
seems, some of the prisoners sent to the Kolyma in several over-
age old tubs on the famous expedition led by the ice-breaker
Krasin in the spring of 1938 are still alive today. On the steamers
Dzhurma, Kulu, Nevostroi, Dneprostroi, for which the Krasin
was breaking the way through the spring ice, there were also
three decks in the cold, dirty holds, and on these decks, in addi-
tion, there were two-story bunks made out of poles. It was not
completely dark: there were some kerosene lanterns and lamps.
The prisoners were allowed up on deck in batches for fresh air
and walks. Three to four thousand prisoners were in each steamer.
The voyage took more than a week, and before it was over all
the bread brought aboard in Vladivostok got moldy and the
ration was reduced from twenty-one to fourteen ounces a day.
They also gave out fish, and as for drinking water . . . Well,
there’s no reason to gloat here, because there were temporary
difficulties with the water. Here, in contrast to the river transports,
there were heavy seas, storms, seasickness. The exhausted, en-
feebled people vomited, and didn’t have the strength to get up
out of their vomit, and all the floors were covered with the
nauseating mess.

There was one political incident on the voyage. The steamers
had to pass through La Pérouse Strait, very close to the Japanese
islands. And at that point the machine guns disappeared from the
watchtowers and the convoy guards changed to civilian clothes,
the hatches were battened down, and access to the decks was
forbidden. According to the ships’ papers, foresightedly prepared

582 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

back in Vladivostok, they were transporting, God save us, not
prisoners but volunteers for work in the Kolyma. A multitude of
Japanese small craft and boats hovered about the ships without
suspecting. (And on another occasion, in 1938, there was an
incident involving the Dzhurma: The thieves aboard got out of
the hold and into the storage room, plundered it, and set it afire.
The ship was very close to Japan when this occurred. Smoke
was pouring from it, and the Japanese offered help, but the cap-
tain refused to accept it and even refused to open the hatches.
When Japan had been left behind, the corpses of those suffocated
by smoke were thrown overboard, and the half-burned, half-
spoiled food aboard was sent on to camp as rations for the
prisoners. )®

Short of Magadan the ship caravan got caught in the ice and
not even the Krasin could help (it was too early for navigation,
but they had been in a hurry to deliver laborers). On May 2 they
disembarked the prisoners on the ice, some distance from the
shore. The newly arrived prisoners got a look at the cheerless
panorama of the Magadan of that time: dead hillocks, neither
trees, nor bushes, nor birds, just a few wooden houses and the
two-story building of “Dalstroi.” Nonetheless, continuing to play
out the farce of correction, in other words, pretending they had
brought not simply bones with which to pave the gold-bearing
Kolyma but temporarily isolated Soviet citizens who would yet
return to creative life, they were greeted by the Dalstroi orchestra.
The orchestra played marches and waltzes, and the tormented,
half-dead people strung along the ice in a gray line, dragging their
Moscow belongings with them (and this enormous prisoner trans-
port consisted almost entirely of politicals who had hardly en-
countered a single thief yet) and carrying on their shoulders
other half-dead people—arthritis sufferers or prisoners without
legs. (And the legless, too, got prison terms.)

But here I note that I am again beginning to repeat myself.
And this will be boring to write, and boring to read, because the

6. Decades have passed since then, but how many times Soviet citizens have
met with misfortune on the world’s oceans—and in circumstances where
it seems that zeks were not being transported—yet because of that same
secretiveness disguised as national pride they have refused help! Let the sharks
devour us, so long as we don’t have to accept yonr helping hand! Secretiveness
—that is our cancer.

The Slave Caravans | 583

reader already knows everything that is going to happen ahead of
time: The prisoners would be trucked hundreds of miles, and
driven dozens of miles more on foot. And on arriving they would
occupy new camp sites and immediately be sent out to work. And
they would eat fish and flour, chased down with snow. And sleep
in tents.

Yes, it was like that. But first the authorities would put them
up in Magadan, also in Arctic tents, and would commission them
there too—in other words, examine them naked to determine
their fitness for labor from the condition of their buttocks (and
all of them would turn out to be fit). In addition, of course, they
would be taken to a bath and in the bath vestibule they would be
ordered to leave their leather coats, their Romanov sheepskin
coats, their woolen sweaters, their suits of fine wool, their felt
cloaks, their leather boots, their felt boots (for, after all, these
were no illiterate peasants this time, but the Party elite—editors
of newspapers, directors of trusts and factories, responsible offi-
cials in the provincial Party committees, professors of political
economy, and, by the beginning of the thirties, all of them under-
stood what good merchandise was). “And who is going to guard
them?” the newcomers asked skeptically. “Oh, come on now,
who needs your things?” The bath personnel acted offended.
“Go on in and don’t worry.” And they did go in. And the exit
was through a different door, and after passing through it, they
received black cotton breeches, field shirts, camp quilted jackets
without pockets, and pigskin shoes. (Oh, this was no small thing!
This was farewell to your former life—to your titles, your posi-
tions, and your arrogance!) “Where are our things?” they cried.
“Your things you left at home!” some chief or other bellowed at
them. “In camp nothing belongs to you. Here in camp we have
communism! Forward march, leader!”

And if it was “communism,” then what was there for them
to object to? That is what they had dedicated their lives to.

B
And there are also prisoner transports in carts and simply on

foot. Do you remember in Tolstoi’s Resurrection how on a sunny
day they drove them on foot from the prison to the railroad sta-

584 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

tion? Well, in Minusinsk in 194-, after the prisoners hadn’t been
taken into the fresh air for a whole year, they had forgotten how
to walk, to breathe, to look at the light. And then they took them
out, put them in formation, and drove them the fifteen miles to
Abakan on foot. About a dozen of them died along the way. And
no one is ever going to write a great novel about it, not even one
chapter: if you live in a graveyard, you can’t weep for everyone.

A prisoner transport on foot—that was the grandfather of
prisoner transport by rail, of the Stolypin car, and of the red
cattle cars too. In our time it is used less and less, and only where
mechanical transportation is still impossible. Thus in one sector
of Lake Ladoga, the prisoners were sent on foot from besieged
Leningrad to the red cars, nicknamed “red cows.” They led the
women together with the German POW’s, and used bayonets to
keep our men away from them so they couldn’t take their bread.
Those who fell by the wayside were immediately tossed up into
a truck alive or dead, after their shoes were removed. And in
the thirties, each day they sent off on foot from the Kotlas Transit
Prison to Ust-Vym (about 185 miles) and sometimes to Chibyu
(more than 300 miles) a transport of a hundred prisoners.
Once in 1938 they sent off a women’s prisoner transport the same
way. These transports covered 15 miles a day. The convoy
marched along with one or two dogs, and those who fell behind
were urged on with gunstocks. True, the prisoners’ possessions
as well as the cooking pot and the food brought up the rear in
carts, and this transport thus recalled the classic prisoner trans-
ports of the past century. There were also prisoner-transport huts
—the ruined houses of liquidated kulaks, with windows broken
and doors ripped off. The accounting office of the Kotlas Transit
Prison had issued provisions to the transport based on a theoreti-
cal estimate of the time the journey would take, provided nothing
went wrong on the way, without allowing for even one extra day.
(The basic principle of all our accounting.) Whenever delays
occurred en route, they had to stretch out the provisions, and
fed the prisoners a mash of rye flour without salt and sometimes
nothing at all. In this respect they departed from the classic
model.

In 1940 Olenyev’s prisoner transport, after disembarking from
the barge, was herded on foot through the taiga (from Knyazh-

The Slave Caravans | 585

Pogost to Chibyu) without anything to eat at all. They drank
swamp water and very quickly got dysentery. Some fell by the
wayside out of weakness, and the dogs tore the clothes off those
who had fallen. In Izhma they caught fish by using their trousers
as nets and ate them alive. (And in a certain meadow they were
told: Right here is where you are going to build a railroad from
Kotlas to Vorkuta. )

And in other areas of our European North, prisoner transports
on foot were standard until the time when, on those same routes
and roadbeds built by those earlier zeks, the jolly red cattle cars
rolled along carrying later prisoners.

A particular technique for prisoner transports on foot was
worked out where such transports were frequent and abundant.
When a transport is being taken through the taiga from Knyazh-
Pogost to Veslyana, and suddenly some prisoner falls by the
wayside and can go no farther, what is to be done with him?
Just be reasonable and think about it: what? You aren’t going
to stop the whole transport. And you aren’t going to leave one
soldier behind for everyone who falls. There are many prisoners
and only a few soldiers. And what does that mean? The soldier
stays behind for a little while with the fallen prisoner and then
hurries on to catch up with the rest—alone.

Regular transports on foot from Karabas to Spassk were
retained for a long time. It was only twenty to twenty-five miles,
but it had to be covered in one day, with one thousand prisoners
in each transport, many of them very weak. It was expected in
cases like these that many would simply either drop in their
tracks or else fall behind through the indifference and apathy of
dying men—you may shoot at them but they still can’t go on. They
are not afraid of death, but what about clubs, the indefatigable
beating of the clubs wherever they hit? They are afraid of clubs,
and they will keep going. This is a tested method—that’s how it
works. And so in these cases the transport column is surrounded
not only by the ordinary chain of machine gunners at a distance
of fifty yards, but also by an inner chain of soldiers armed only
with clubs. Those who have fallen behind get beaten. (As, in
fact, Comrade Stalin prophesied.) They are beaten again and
again. And even when they have no strength at all with which
to go farther, they keep going. And many do miraculously get

586 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

to the destination. They don’t know that this is a testing by
clubs, and that those who lie down and stay lying down and don’t
go on despite the clubs are picked up by carts following behind.
Thats organizational experience for you! (And one can ask:
Why, then, didn’t they take them all on carts in the first place?
But where could enough carts be found? And horses? After all,
we have tractors. What about the price of oats nowadays?) Such
transports as these were still common in 1948—1950.

And in the twenties, transport on foot was one of the basic
methods. I was a small boy, but I remember very well how they
drove them down the streets of Rostov-on-the-Don without any
qualms. And the famous order: “. . . will open fire without warn-
ing!” had a different ring at that time, again because of a differ-
ence in technology: after all, the convoy often had only sabers.
They used to deliver orders like this: “One step out of line and
the convoy guard will shoot and slash!” That had a very powerful
sound: “shoot and slash!” You could imagine them cutting off
your head from behind.

Yes, and even in February, 1936, they drove on foot through
Nizhni Novgorod a transport of long-bearded old men from the
other side of the Volga, in their homespun coats and in real lapty
—bast sandals—wrapped around with onuchi—Russian peasant
footcloths—“Old Russia disappearing.” And all of a sudden,
right across their path, came three automobiles, in one of
which rode the Chairman of the Central Executive Committee,
President of the Soviet Union, this is to say, Kalinin. The
prisoner transport halted. Kalinin went on through. He wasn’t
interested.

Shut your eyes, reader. Do you hear the thundering of wheels?
Those are the Stolypin cars rolling on and on. Those are the red
cows rolling. Every minute of the day. And every day of the year.
And you can hear the water gurgling—those are prisoners’ barges
moving on and on. And the motors of the Black Marias roar.
They are arresting someone all the time, cramming him in some-
where, moving him about. And what is that hum you hear? The
overcrowded cells of the transit prisons. And that cry? The com-
plaints of those who have been plundered, raped, beaten to
within an inch of their lives.

The Slave Caravans | 587

We have reviewed and considered all the methods of deliver-
ing prisoners, and we have found that they are all . . . worse.
We have examined the transit prisons, but we have not found any
that were good. And even the last human hope that there is some-
thing better ahead, that it will be better in camp, is a false hope.

In camp it will be . . . worse.

Chapter 4

From Island to Island

And zeks are also moved from island to island of the Archi-
pelago simply in solitary skiffs. This is called special convoy. It
is the most unconstrained mode of transport. It can hardly be
distinguished from free travel. Only a few prisoners are delivered
in this way. I, in my own career as a prisoner, made three such
journeys.

The special convoy is assigned on orders from high officials. It
should not be confused with the special requisition, which is also
signed by someone high up. A special-requisition prisoner usually
travels on the general prisoner transports, though he, too, meets
up with some amazing interludes on his trip (which are all the
more extraordinary in consequence). For example, Ans Bern-
shtein was traveling on a special requisition from the North to the
lower Volga, to join an agricultural mission. He was exposed to
all the overcrowded conditions and humiliations I have described,
snarled at by dogs, surrounded by bayonets, threatened with “One
step out of line . . .” And then suddenly he was unloaded at the
small station at Zenzevatka and met by one single, calm, un-
armed jailer. The jailer yawned: “All right, you'll spend the
night at my house, and you can go out on the town as you like
till morning. Tomorrow [ll take you to the camp.” And Ans
did go out. Can you understand what going out on the town
means to a person whose term is ten years, who has already said
good-bye to life countless times, who was in a Stolypin car that

588

From Island to Island | 589

very morning and will be in camp the next day? And he im-
mediately went out to watch the chickens scratching around in
the station master’s garden and the peasant women getting ready
to leave the station with their unsold butter and melons. He
moved three, four, five steps to the side and no one shouted
“Halt!” at him. With unbelieving fingers he touched the leaves of
the acacias and almost wept.

And the special convoy is precisely that sort of miracle from
beginning to end. You won’t see the common prisoner transports
this time. You don’t have to keep your hands behind your back.
You don’t have to undress down to your skin, nor sit on the
earth on your rear end, and there won’t be any search at all. Your
convoy guards approach you in a friendly way and even address
you politely. They warn you, as a general precaution, that in case
of any attempt to escape—We do, as usual, shoot. Our pistols
are loaded and we have them in our pockets. However, let’s go
simply. Act natural. Don’t let everyone see that you’re a prisoner.
(And I urge you to note how here, too, as always, the interests
of the individual and the interests of the state coincide com-
pletely.)

My camp life was totally transformed the day I went out to
line up forlornly in the carpenters’ brigade, my fingers cramped
(they had gotten stiff holding onto tools and wouldn’t straighten
out), and the work-assignment supervisor took me aside and with
unexpected respect said to me: “Do you know that on orders
of the Minister of Internal Affairs... ?”

I was stupefied. The line-up dispersed and the trusties in the
camp compound surrounded me. Some of them said: “They are
going to hang a new stretch on you.” And others said: “To be
released.” But everyone agreed on one thing—that there was
no escaping Minister of Internal Affairs Kruglov. And I, too,
swayed between a new term and being released. I had quite for-
gotten that half a year before, some character had come to our
camp and distributed Gulag registration cards. (After the war
they had begun this registration in all the nearby camps, but it
seems unlikely that it was ever completed.) The most important
question on it was: “Trade or Profession.” And the zeks would
fill in the most precious Gulag trades to enhance their own value:
“barber,” “tailor,” “storekeeper,” “baker.” As for me, I had

590 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

frowned and filled in “nuclear physicist.” I had never been a nu-
clear physicist in my life, and what I knew of the field I had
heard in the university before the war—just a little bit, the names
of the atomic particles and their parameters. And I had decided
to write down “nuclear physicist.” This was in 1946. The atom
bomb was desperately needed. But I didn’t assign any importance
to that Gulag registration card and, in fact, forgot about it.

There was a vague, unverified legend, unconfirmed by any-
body, that you might nevertheless hear in camp: that some-
where in this Archipelago were tiny paradise islands. No one had
seen them. No one had been there. Whoever had, kept silent
about them and never let on. On those islands, they said, flowed
rivers of milk and honey, and eggs and sour cream were the least
of what they fed you; things were neat and clean, they said, and
it was always warm, and the only work was mental work—and
all of it super-supersecret.

And so it was that I got to those paradise islands iseli (in
convict lingo they are called “sharashkas”) and spent half my
sentence on them. It’s to them I owe my survival, for I would
never have lived out my whole term in the camps. And it’s to
them I owe the fact that I am writing this investigation, even
though I have not allowed them any place in this book. (I have
already written a novel about them.) And it was from one to an-
other of those islands, from the first to the second, and from the
second to the third, that I was transported on a special-convoy
basis: two jailers and I.

If the souls of those who have died sometimes hover among
us, see us, easily read in us our trivial concerns, and we fail to
see them or guess at their incorporeal presence, then that is what
a special-convoy trip is like.

You are submerged in the mass of freedom, and you push and
shove with the others in the station waiting room. You absent-
mindedly examine announcements posted there, even though they
can hardly have any relevance for you. You sit on the ancient
passenger benches, and you hear strange and insignificant con-
versations: about some husband who beats up his wife or has
left her; and some mother-in-law who, for some reason, does not
get along with her daughter-in-law; how neighbors in communal
apartments make personal use of the electric outlets in the corri-

From Island to Island | 591

dor and don’t wipe their feet; and how someone is in someone
else’s way at the office; and how someone has been offered a good
job but can’t make up his mind to move—how can he move bag
and baggage, is that so easy? You listen to all this, and the goose
pimples of rejection run up and down your spine: to you the
true measure of things in the Universe is so clear! The measure
of all weaknesses and all passions! And these sinners aren’t fated
to perceive it. The only one there who is alive, truly alive, is
incorporeal you, and all these others are simply mistaken in
thinking themselves alive.

And an unbridgeable chasm divides you! You cannot cry out
to them, nor weep over them, nor shake them by the shoulder:
after all, you are a disembodied spirit, you are a ghost, and they
are material bodies.

And how can you bring it home to them? By an inspiration?
By a vision? A dream? Brothers! People! Why has life been given
you? In the deep, deaf stillness of midnight, the doors of the
death cells are being swung open—and great-souled people are
being dragged out to be shot. On all the railroads of the country
this very minute, right now, people who have just been fed salt
herring are licking their dry lips with bitter tongues. They dream
of the happiness of stretching out one’s legs and of the relief
one feels after going to the toilet. In Orotukan the earth thaws
only in summer and only to the depth of three feet—and only then
can they bury the bones of those who died during the winter.
And you have the right to arrange your own life under the blue
sky and the hot sun, to get a drink of water, to stretch, to travel
wherever you like without a convoy. So what’s this about unwiped
feet? And what’s this about a mother-in-law? What about the
main thing in life, all its riddles? If you want, Pll spell it out for
you right now. Do not pursue what is illusory—property and posi-
tion: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after
decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady
superiority over life—don’t be afraid of misfortune, and do not
yearn after happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter
doesn’t last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to over-
flowing. It is enough if you don’t freeze in the cold and if thirst
and hunger don’t claw at your insides. If your back isn’t broken,
if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes see,

592 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

and if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why?
Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and
purify your heart—and prize above all else in the world those who
love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold
them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you
simply do not know: it might be your last act before your arrest,
and that will be how you are imprinted in their memory!

But the convoy guards stroke the black handles of the pistols
in their pockets. And we sit there, three in a row, sober fellows,
quiet friends.

I wipe my brow. I shut my eyes, and then I open them. And
once again I see this dream: a crowd of people unaccompanied
by guards. I remember clearly that I spent last night in a cell
and will be in a cell again tomorrow. But here comes some kind
of conductor to punch my ticket: “Your ticket!” “My friend
there has it!”

The cars are full. (Well, “full” in free people’s terms—no
one is lying under the benches, and no one is sitting on the floor
in the aisles.) I was told to behave naturally, and I have been
behaving very naturally indeed: I noticed a seat beside a window
in the next compartment, and got up and took it. And there were
no empty seats for my guards in that compartment. They sat
where they were and kept their loving eyes on me from there.
In Perebory, the seat across the table from me was vacated, but
before my guard could get to it and sit down, a moon-faced fel-
low in a sheepskin coat and a fur cap, with a plain but strong
wooden suitcase, sat down there. I recognized his suitcase: it
was camp work, “made in the Archipelago.”

“Whew!” he puffs. There was very little light, but I could
see he was red in the face and that he had had a hassle to get on
the train. And he got out a bottle: “How about a beer, comrade?”
I knew that my guards were close to a nervous breakdown in the
next compartment: I was not allowed anything alcoholic. But still
. . . I was supposed to conduct myself as naturally as possible.
And so I said carelessly: “All right, why not?” (Beer! It’s a whole
poem! For three years I hadn’t had even one swallow. And
tomorrow in my cell I would brag: “I got beer!”) The fellow
poured it, and I drank it down with a shiver of pleasure. It was
already dark. There was no electricity in the car. This was post-

From Island to Island | 593

war dislocation. One tiny candle end was burning in an ancient
lantern at the door, one for four compartments: two in front and
two behind. I talked amiably with the fellow even though we
could hardly see each other. No matter how far forward my guard
leaned, he couldn’t hear a thing because of the clickety-clack of
the wheels. In my pocket I had a postcard addressed to my home.
And I was about to explain who I was to my simple friend across
the table and ask him to drop the card in a mailbox. Judging by
his suitcase he had been in stir himself. But he beat me to it: “You
know, I just barely managed to get some leave. They haven’t
given me any time off for two years; it’s a dog’s branch of the
service.” “What kind?” “Don’t you know? I’m an MVD man,
an asmodeus, blue shoulder boards, haven’t you ever seen them?”
Hell! Why hadn’t I guessed right off? Perebory was the center
for Volgolag, and he had gotten his suitcase out of the zeks, they
had made it for him for free. How all this had permeated our
life! Two MVD men, two asmodei, weren’t enough in two com-
partments. There had to be a third. And perhaps there was also
a fourth concealed somewhere? And maybe they were in every
compartment? And maybe someone else there was traveling by
special convoy like me.

My fellow kept on whining and complaining of his fate. And
at that point, I decided to enter a somewhat mystifying demurrer.
“And what about the ones you’re guarding, the ones who got ten
years for nothing—is it any easier for them?” He immediately
subsided and remained silent until morning: earlier, in the semi-
darkness, he had noticed that I was wearing some kind of semi-
military overcoat and field shirt. And he had thought I was simply
a soldier boy, but now the devil only knew what I might be:
Maybe I was a police agent? Maybe I was out to catch escapees?
Why was I in this particular car? And he had criticized the camps
there in my presence.

By this time the candle end in the lantern was floating but still
burning. On the third baggage shelf some youth was talking in a
pleasant voice about the war—the real war, the kind you don’t
read about in books: he had been with a unit of field engineers
and was describing incidents that were true to life. And it was so
pleasant to realize that unvarnished truth was, despite everything,
pouring into someone’s ears.

594 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

I could have told tales too. I would even have liked to. But no,
I didn’t really want to any more. Like a cow, the war had licked
away four of my years. I no longer believed that it had all actually
happened and I didn’t want to remember it. Two years here, two
years in the Archipelago, had dimmed in my mind all the roads of
the front, all the comradeship of the front line, had totally dark-
ened them.

One wedge knocks out another.

And after spending a few hours among free people, here is
what I feel: My lips are mute; there is no place for me among
them; my hands are tied here. I want free speech! I want to go
back to my native land! I want to go home to the Archipelago!

In the morning I deliberately forgot my postcard on an upper
Shelf: after all, the conductor will get around to cleaning up the
car; she will carry it to a mailbox—if she is a human being.

We emerge onto the square in front of the Northern Station in
Moscow. Again my jailers are newcomers to Moscow, and don’t
know the city. We travel on streetcar “B,” and I make the de-
cisions for them. There is a mob at the streetcar stop in the middle
of the square; everyone is on the way to work at this hour. One
jailer climbs up to the streetcar motorman and shows him his MVD
identity card. We are allowed to stand imposingly on the front
platform for the whole trip, as if we were deputies of the Moscow
Soviet, and we don’t bother to get tickets. An old man isn’t
allowed to board there—he isn’t an invalid and he has to board
in the rear like the others.

We approach Novoslobodskaya and disembark—and for the
first time I see Butyrki Prison from the outside, even though it’s
the fourth time I’ve been brought there and I can draw its in-
terior plan without difficulty. Oof, what a grim, high wall stretches
for two blocks there! The hearts of the Muscovites shiver when
they see the steel maw of its gates slide open. But I leave the
sidewalks of Moscow behind me without regret, and as I enter
that tower of the gatehouse I feel I am returning home. I smile at
the first courtyard and recognize the familiar main doors of
carved wood. And it’s nothing at all to me that they are now
going to make me face the wall—and they already have—and
ask me: “Last name? Given name and patronymic? Year of
birth?”

From Island to Island | 595

My name? I am the Interstellar Wanderer! They have tightly
bound my body, but my soul is beyond their power.

I know: after several hours of inevitable processing of my
body—confinement in a box, search, issuing receipts, filling out
the admissions card, after the roaster and the bath—I shall be
taken to a cell with two domes, with a hanging arch in the middle
(all the cells are like that), with two large windows and a long
combination table and cupboard. And I shall be greeted by
strangers who are certain to be intelligent, interesting, friendly
people, and they will begin to tell me their stories, and I will
begin to tell them mine, and by night we will not even feel like
going off to sleep right away.

And on the bowls will be stamped (so we shouldn’t make off
with them on the prisoner transport) the mark “Bu-Tyur”’—for
Butyrskaya Tyurma, Butyrki Prison. The “BuTyur” Health Re-
sort, as we mocked it last time. A health resort, incidentally, very
little known to the paunchy bigwigs who want so badly to lose
weight. They drag their stomachs to Kislovodsk, and go out for
long hikes on prescribed trails, do push-ups, and sweat for a
whole month just to lose four to six pounds. And there in the
“BuTyur” Health Resort, right near them, anyone of them could
lose seventeen or eighteen pounds just like that, in one week,
without doing any exercises at all.

This is a tried and true method. It has never failed.

One of the truths you learn in prison is that the world is small,
very small indeed. True, the Gulag Archipelago, although it ex-
tended across the entire Soviet Union, had many fewer inhabi-
tants than the Soviet Union as a whole. How many there actually
were in the Archipelago one cannot know for certain. We can
assume that at any one time there were not more than twelve
million in the camps’ (as some departed beneath the sod, the
Machine kept bringing in replacements). And not more than
half of them were politicals. Six million? Well, that’s a small
country, Sweden or Greece, and in such countries many people

1. According to the researches of the Social Democrats Nicolaevsky and
Dallin, there were from fifteen to twenty million prisoners in the camps.

596 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

know one another. And quite naturally when you landed in any
cell of any transit prison and listened and chatted, you’d be cer-
tain to discover you had acquaintances in common with some of
your cellmates. (And so D., after having spent more than a year
in solitary confinement, after Sukhanovka, after Ryumin’s beat-
ings and the hospital, could land in a Lubyanka cell and give
his name, and then and there a bright chap named F. could greet
him: “Aha, so now I know who you are!” “Where from?” D. shied
away from him. “You are mistaken.” “Certainly not. You are
that very same American, Alexander D., whom the bourgeois
press lied about, saying you had been kidnaped—and TASS
denied it. I was free at the time and read about it.” )

I love that moment when a newcomer is admitted to the cell for
the first time (not a novice who has only recently been arrested
and will inevitably be depressed and confused, but a veteran
zek). And I myself love to enter a new cell (nonetheless, God
grant I never have to do it again) with an unworried smile and
an expansive gesture: “Hi, brothers!” I throw my bag on the
bunks. “Well, so what’s new this past year in Butyrki?”

We begin to get acquainted. Some fellow named Suvorov, a 58.
At first glance there’s nothing remarkable about him, but you
probe and pry: at the Krasnoyarsk Transit Prison a certain
Makhotkin was in his cell.

“Just a moment, wasn’t he an Arctic aviator?”

“Yes. They named.. .”

“,.. an island after him in the Taimyr Gulf. And he’s in
prison for 58-10. So does that mean they let him go to Dudinka?”

“How do you know? Yes.”

Wonderful! One more link in the biography of a man I don’t
know. I have never met him, and perhaps I never shall. But my
efficient memory has filed away everything I know about him:
Makhotkin got a whole “quarter’—twenty-five years—but the
island named after him couldn’t be renamed because it was on
all the maps of the world (it wasn’t a Gulag island). They had
taken him on at the aviation sharashka in Bolshino and he was
unhappy there: an aviator among engineers, and not allowed to
fly. They split that sharashka in two, and Makhotkin got assigned
to the Taganrog half, and it seemed as though all connection with
him had been severed. In the other half of it, however, in Rybinsk,

From Island to Island | 597

I was told that he had asked to be allowed to fly in the Far North.
And now I had just learned he had been given that permission.
This was not information I needed, but I had remembered it all.
And ten days later I turned up in the same Butyrki bath box
(there are such lovely boxes in the Butyrki, with faucets and small
washtubs so as not to tie up the big bath chambers) as a certain R.
I didn’t know this R. either, but it turned out he had been a patient
in the Butyrki hospital for half a year and was about to leave for
the Rybinsk sharashka. In another three days the prisoners in
Rybinsk, too, a closed box where zeks are cut off from all ties with
the outside world, would nevertheless learn that Makhotkin was
in Dudinka, and they would also find out where I had been sent.

Now this is the prisoners’ telegraph system: attentiveness,
memory, chance meetings.

And this attractive man in horn-rimmed spectacles? He walked
around the cell humming Schubert in a pleasant baritone.

And youth again oppresses me,
And the way to the grave is long.

“Tsarapkin, Sergei Romanovich.”

“But look here, I know you very well indeed. You're a biol-
ogist? A nonreturnee? From Berlin?”

“How do you know?”

“But after all, it’s a small world! In 1946 with Nikolai Vladi-
mirovich Timofeyev-Ressovsky . . .”

Oh, what a cell that had been in 1946: The memories of it
returned. It was perhaps the most brilliant cell in all my prison
life. It was July. They had taken me from the camp to the
Butyrki on those mysterious “instructions of the Minister of In-
ternal Affairs.” We arrived after lunch, but the prison was so
overloaded that the reception processing took eleven hours, and
it was not until 3 A.M. that, tired from the boxes, I was admitted
to Cell 75. Lit by two bright electric bulbs below the two domes,
the whole cell slept side by side, restless because of the stuffiness:
the hot July air couldn’t circulate through the windows blocked
by the “muzzles.” Sleepless flies kept buzzing, and the sleepers
twitched when the flies lit on them. Some of the prisoners had put
handkerchiefs over their faces to keep the light out of their eyes.

598 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

The latrine barrel smelled acrid—everything decayed more
quickly in such heat. Eighty people were stuffed into a cell for
twenty-five—and this was not the limit either. Prisoners lay
tightly packed together on the bunks to left and right and also
on the supplementary planks laid across the aisle, and everywhere
feet were sticking out from under the bunks, and the traditional
Butyrki table-cupboard was pushed back to the latrine barrel.
That was where there was still a piece of unoccupied floor, and
that was where I lay down. And thus it was that whoever got up
to use the latrine barrel before morning had to step across me.

When the order “Get up!” was given, shouted through the swill
trough in the door, everything started to stir: They began to take
up the planks from across the aisles and push the table to the
window. Prisoners came up to interview me—to find out whether
I was a novice or a camp veteran. It turned out that two different
waves had met in the cell: the ordinary wave of freshly sentenced
prisoners being sent off to camp and a reverse wave of camp in-
mates who were all technical specialists—physicists, chemists,
mathematicians, design engineers—all being sent to unknown
destinations, to some sort of thriving scientific research institutes.
(At this point I relaxed: the Minister was not going to hang a
new stretch on me.) I was approached by a man who was middle-
aged, broad-shouldered yet very skinny, with a slightly aquiline
nose:

“Professor Timofeyev-Ressovsky, President of the Scientific
and Technical Society of Cell 75. Our society assembles every day
after the morning bread ration, next to the left window. Perhaps
you could deliver a scientific report to us? What precisely might
it be?”

Caught unaware, I stood before him in my long bedraggled
overcoat and winter cap (those arrested in winter are foredoomed
to go about in winter clothing during the summer too). My
fingers had not yet straightened out that morning and were all
scratched. What kind of scientific report could I give? And right
then I remembered that in camp I had recently held in my hands
for two nights the Smyth Report, the official report of the United
States Defense Department on the first atom bomb, which had
been brought in from outside. The book had been published that
spring. Had anyone in the cell seen it? It was a useless question.

From Island to Island | 599

Of course no one had. And thus it was that fate played its joke,
compelling me, in spite of everything, to stray into nuclear physics,
the same field in which I had registered on the Gulag card.

After the rations were issued, the Scientific and Technical So-
ciety of Cell 75, consisting of ten or so people, assembled at the
left window and I made my report and was accepted into the
society. I had forgotten some things, and I could not fully com-
prehend others, and Timofeyev-Ressovsky, even though he had
been in prison for a year and knew nothing of the atom bomb,
was able on occasion to fill in the missing parts of my account.
An empty cigarette pack was my blackboard, and I held an
illegal fragment of pencil lead. Nikolai Vladimirovich took them
away from me and sketched and interrupted, commenting with as
much self-assurance as if he had been a physicist from the Los
Alamos group itself.

He actually had worked with one of the first European cyclo-
trons, but for the purpose of irradiating fruit flies. He was a
biologist, one of the most important geneticists of our time. He
had already been in prison back when Zhebrak, not knowing
that (or, perhaps, knowing it), had the courage to write in a
Canadian magazine: “Russian biology is not responsible for
Lysenko; Russian biology is Timofeyev-Ressovsky.” (And during
the destruction of Soviet biology in 1948 Zhebrak paid for this.)
Schrédinger, in his small book What Is Life?, twice cited
Timofeyev-Ressovsky, who had long since been imprisoned.

And there he was in front of us, and he was simply bursting
with information concerning all possible sciences. He had that
breadth of scope which scientists of later generations don’t even
want to have. (Or is it that the possibilities of encompassing
knowledge have changed?) And even though at the moment he
was so worn down by the starvation of the interrogation period
that these exercises were very difficult for him. On his mother’s
side he was descended from impoverished Kaluga gentlefolk who
had lived on the Ressa River, and on his father’s side he was a
collateral descendant of Stepan Razin, and that Cossack energy
was very obvious in him—in his broad frame, in his basic sound-
ness, in his determined struggle with his interrogator, and also in
the fact that he suffered from hunger more than we did.

And his story was this: In 1922 the German scientist Vogt,

600 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

who had founded the Brain Institute in Moscow, had asked to
have two talented graduate students sent abroad to work with
him permanently. And that was how Timofeyev-Ressovsky and
his friend Tsarapkin had been sent off on a foreign assignment
with no time limit. And even though they did not have any
ideological guidance there, they nonetheless achieved great things
in science, and when in 1937 (!) they were instructed to return
to their homeland, this seemed to them, since it meant inter-
rupting their work, impossible. They could not abandon either the
logical continuation of their own researches or their apparatus
or their students. And, no doubt, they also couldn’t do it because
back in the Motherland they would have been compelled to pour
shit publicly all over their fifteen years of work in Germany. And
only that would have earned them the right to go on existing (and
would it have earned it for them?). And so they became non-
returnees, remaining patriots nevertheless.

In 1945 the Soviet armies entered Buch (a northeast suburb
of Berlin), and Timofeyev-Ressovsky and his entire institute
joyously welcomed them: everything had worked out in the best
possible way, and now he would not have to be separated from
his institute! Soviet representatives came to inspect it and said:
“Hmm! hmm! Put everything in packing cases, and we'll take it
all to Moscow.” “That’s impossible,” Timofeyev objected. “Every-
thing will die on the way. The installations have taken years to
set up.” “Hmm!” The bigwigs acted astonished. And very shortly
after that Timofeyev and Tsarapkin were arrested and taken off
to Moscow. They were naive. They had thought that the institute
would not be able to operate without them. Well, even if it didn’t
operate, the general line of the Party must triumph! In the Big
Lubyanka it was very easily proven to the arrested individuals
that they were traitors of the Motherland (or to it?), and they
were sentenced to ten years, and now the President of the Scien-
tific and Technical Society of Cell 75 took heart from the thought
that he hadn’t made any errors.

In the Butyrki cells, the arched metal frames supporting the
bunks were very, very low. Even the prison administration had
never thought of having prisoners sleep under them. Therefore,
you first tossed your neighbor your coat so that he could spread it
out for you under there, and then you lay face down in the aisle

From Island to Island | 601

and crawled your way in. Prisoners walked through the aisle, the
floor underneath the bunks was swept maybe once a month, and
you could wash your hands only during the evening trip to the
toilet, and even then without soap—and it was thus impossible to
say that you could perceive your body as-a Divine vessel. But I
was happy! There, on the asphalt floor, under the bunks, in a dog’s
den, with dust and crumbs from the bunks falling in our eyes, I
was absolutely happy, without any qualifications. Epicurus spoke
truly: Even the absence of variety can be sensed as satisfaction
when a variety of dissatisfactions has preceded it. After camp,
which had already seemed endless, and after a ten-hour workday,
after cold, rain, and aching back, oh, what happiness it was to lie
there for whole days on end, to sleep, and nevertheless receive a
pound and a half of bread and two hot meals a day—made from
cattle feed, or from dolphin’s flesh. In a word, the “BuTyur”
Health Resort.

To sleep was so important! To lie there on one’s belly, to cover
one’s back and just to sleep. When you were asleep, you didn’t
spend your strength nor torment your heart—and meanwhile
your sentence was passing, passing. When our life crackles and
sparks like a torch, we curse the necessity of spending eight hours
uselessly in sleep. When we have been deprived of everything,
when we have been deprived of hope, then bless you, fourteen
hours of sleep!

But they kept me in that cell two months, and I slept enough to
make up for the past year and the year ahead, and during that
time I moved forward under the bunks to the window and then
all the way back to the latrine barrel, but on the bunks this time,
and then on the bunks I moved to the archway. I was sleeping
very little by this time—I was gulping down the elixir of life and
enjoying myself. In the morning the Scientific and Technical So-
ciety, then chess, books (oh, those itinerant books, there were
only three or four for eight or ten people, and there was always
a waiting list for them), then a twenty-minute walk outdoors—a
major chord! We never refused our walk even when it was raining
heavily. And the main thing was people, people, people! Nikolai
Andreyevich Semyonov, one of the creators of the Dnieper Hy-
droelectric Dam and Power Station. His POW friend, the engineer
F. F. Karpov. Witty, caustic Viktor Kagan, a physicist. The

602 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

musician and conservatory student Volodya Klempner, a com-
poser. A woodcutter and hunter from the Vyatka forests, as pro-
found as a forest lake. An Orthodox preacher from Europe,
Yevgeny Ivanovich Divnich. He did not confine himself to
theology, but condemned Marxism, declaring that no one in
Europe had taken it seriously for a long while—and I defended
it, because after all I was a Marxist. And even a year ago I
would have confidently demolished him with quotations; how
disparagingly I would have mocked him! But my first year as
a prisoner had left its mark inside me—and just when had that
happened? I hadn’t noticed: there had been so many new events,
sights, meanings, that I could no longer say: “They don’t exist!
That’s a bourgeois lie!” And now I had to admit: “Yes, they do
exist.” And right at that point my whole line of reasoning began
to weaken, and so they could beat me in our arguments without
half-trying.

And again the POW’s kept coming and coming and coming—
this was the second year of the wave of them that kept unceasingly
coming from Europe. And once more there were Russian émigrés
—from Europe, from Manchuria. One went about among the
émigrés seeking news of acquaintances by first asking what
country they had come from, and did they know so and so? Yes,
of course, they did. (And that is how I learned of the execution
of Colonel Yasevich. )

And the old German, that portly German, now emaciated and
ill, whom I had once upon a time back in East Prussia (was it
two hundred years ago?) forced to carry my suitcase. Oh, how
small the world really is! Strange fate that brought us together
again! The old man smiled at me. He recognized me too, and
even seemed pleased by our meeting. He had forgiven me. He had
been sentenced to ten years, but he certainly didn’t have anywhere
near that long to live. And there was another German there too—
lanky and young, but unresponsive—perhaps because he didn’t
know one word of Russian. You wouldn’t even take him for a
German right off the bat: the thieves had torn off everything
German he had on and given him a faded old Soviet field shirt in
exchange. He was a famous German air ace. His first campaign
had been in the war between Bolivia and Paraguay, his second in
Spain, his third Poland, his fourth over England, his fifth Cyprus,

From Island to Island | 603

his sixth the Soviet Union. Since he was an ace he could certainly
not have avoided shooting down women and children from the
air! That made him a war criminal and he got a prison sentence
and a “muzzle” of five additional years. And, of course, there
had to be one right-thinking person (like Prosecutor Kretov) in
the cell: “They were right to imprison all you counterrevolu-
tionary bastards! History will grind up your bones for fertilizer!”
“You're going to be fertilizer yourself, you dog!” they shouted
back. “No, they will reconsider my case. I am innocent!” And the
whole cell howled and seethed. And a gray-haired Russian-
language teacher stood up on the bunks, barefoot, and wrung his
hands like a latter-day Jesus Christ: “Children of mine, make
peace with one another! My children!” And they howled at him
too: “Your children are in the Bryansk forests! We are nobody’s
children! All we are is the sons of Gulag.”

After dinner and the evening trip to the toilet, night cloaked
the window “muzzles” and the nagging electric lights below the
ceiling lit up. Day divided the prisoners and night drew them
closer together. There were no quarrels in the evening: lectures
and concerts were given. And in this, too, Timofeyev-Ressovsky
shone: he spent entire evenings on Italy, Denmark, Norway,
Sweden. The émigrés spoke about the Balkans, about France.
Someone delivered a lecture on Le Corbusier. Someone else
delivered one on the habits of bees. Someone else on Gogol. This
was when we smoked our lungs full. Smoke filled up the cell
and hovered in the air like a fog, and there was no draft to pull it
out the window because of the “muzzles.” Kostya Kiula, twin to
me in age, round-faced, blue-eyed, amusingly awkward, stepped
up to the table and recited to us the verses he had composed in
prison.” His voice broke with emotion. His verses were entitled,
“My First Food Parcel,” “To My Wife,” “To My Son.” When in
prison you strain to get by ear verses written in prison, you don’t
waste a single thought on whether the author’s use of syllabic
stress is faulty and whether his lines end in assonances or full
rhymes. These verses are the blood of your own heart, the tears
of your own wife. The cell wept.

In that cell I myself set out to write verses about prison. And

2. Kostya Kiula doesn’t respond, he’s disappeared. I am afraid he is not
among the living.

604 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

it was there that I recited the verses of Yesenin, who had almost
but not quite been on the forbidden list before the war. And
young Bubnov, a POW, and before that, apparently, a student
who had not completed his studies, worshipfully gazed at those
reciting, his face aglow. He was not a technical specialist and he
hadn’t come from camp, but was on his way there, and because
of the purity and forthrightness of his character he would in all
likelihood die there. People like him don’t survive there. And
for him and for others—their fatal descent braked for the moment
—the evenings in Cell 75 were a sudden revelation of that beauti-
ful world which exists and will continue to exist but which their
own hard fate hadn’t given them one little year of, not even one
little year of their young lives.

The swill trough dropped down and the turnkey’s mug barked
at us: “Bed.” No, even before the war, when I was studying at
two higher educational institutions at the same time and earning
my way by tutoring, and striving to write too, even then I had not
experienced such full, such heart-rending, such completely filled
days, as I did in Cell 75 that summer.

“But listen,” I said to Tsarapkin, “I’ve heard since then from
someone called Deul, a sixteen-year-old boy who got a fiver (not
on a school report card) for ‘anti-Soviet’ propaganda. .. .”

“What, do you know him too? He was on our prisoner trans-
port to Karaganda. .. .”

“... I heard,” I continued, “that you were given work as a
laboratory assistant doing medical analyses and that Timofeyev-
Ressovsky was constantly being sent out on general-assignment
work... .”

“Yes, and he grew very weak. He was half-dead when they
brought him from the Stolypin car here to the Butyrki. And he is
in a hospital bed here right now, and the Fourth Special De-
partment? is issuing him cream and even wine, but it’s hard to
say whether he will ever get back on his feet again.”

“Did the Fourth Special Department summon you?”

“Yes. They asked us whether we considered it might still be
possible after six months of Karaganda to start setting up our in-
stitute here, in the Fatherland.”

3. The task of the Fourth Special Department of the MVD was to solve
scientific problems, using prisoners.

From Island to Island | 605

“And you, of course, agreed enthusiastically.”

“Most certainly! After all, we have come to understand our
mistakes. And besides, all the equipment wrenched from its
original place and put into packing cases got here even with-
out us.”

“What dedication to science on the part of the MVD! May I
ask for a little more Schubert?”

And Tsarapkin sang softly, staring sadly at the window (his
spectacles reflecting both their dark “muzzles” and their light
upper sections):

Vom Abendrot zum Morgenlicht
ward mancher Kopf zum Greise.

Wer glaubt es? Meiner ward es nicht
auf dieser ganzen Reise.

Tolstoi’s dream has come true: Prisoners are no longer compelled
to attend pernicious religious services. The prison churches have
been shut down. True, their buildings remain, but they have
been successfully adapted to enlarge the prisons themselves. Two
thousand additional prisoners have thereby been housed in the
Butyrki church—and in the course of a year, estimating an aver-
age turnover of two weeks, another fifty thousand will pass
through the cells in what was once the church.

On arriving at the Butyrki for the fourth or fifth time, hurrying
confidently to my assigned cell, through the courtyard surrounded
by prison buildings, and even outstripping the jailer by a shoulder
(like a horse that hurries, without the urging of whip or reins,
home to where the oats are waiting), I sometimes even forgot to
glance at the square church rising into an octagon. It stood apart
in the middle of the courtyard quadrangle. Its “muzzles” were
not machine-made of glass reinforced with iron rods as they
were in the main section of the prison. They were rotten, un-
planed gray boards, pure and simple—and they indicated: the
building’s second-rank priority. What they maintained there was
a kind of intra-Butyrki transit prison, so to speak, for recently
sentenced prisoners.

And at one time, in 1945, I had experienced it as a big, im-
portant step when they led us into the church after our OSO

606 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

sentencing (and that was the right time to do it too!—it was a
good time for prayer!), took us up to the second floor (and the
third floor was also partitioned off), and from the octagonal-
vestibule distributed us among different cells. Mine was the
southeast cell.

This was a large square cell in which, at the time, two hun-
dred prisoners were confined. They were sleeping, as they did
everywhere else there, on the bunks (and they were one-story
bunks), under the bunks, and just simply on the tile floor, out in
the aisles. Not only were the “muzzles” on the windows second-
rate; everything else, too, was in a style appropriate not to true
sons of Butyrki but to its stepsons. No books, no chess sets, no
checkers were distributed to this swarming mass, and the dented
aluminum bowls and beat-up wooden spoons were collected and
removed from one mealtime to another for fear that in the rush
they might get carried off on prisoner transports. They were even
stingy with mugs for the stepsons. They washed the bowls after
the gruel, and then the prisoners had to lap up their tea slops
out of them. The absence of one’s own dishes was particularly
acute for those who experienced the mixed blessing of receiving
a parcel from their families (despite their meager means, relatives
made a special effort to provide parcels in those last days before
the prisoner transports left). The families had had no prison ed-
ucation themselves, and they never got any good advice in the
prison reception office either. And therefore they didn’t send
plastic dishes, the one and only kind prisoners were allowed to
have, but glass or metal ones instead. All these honeys, jams,
condensed milks were pitilessly poured and scraped out of their
cans through the swill trough in the cell door into whatever the
prisoner had, and in the church cells he had nothing at all, which
meant that he simply got it in the palms of his hands, in his
mouth, in his handkerchief, in the flaps of his coat—which was
quite normal in Gulag terms, but not in the center of Moscow!
And at the same time the jailer kept hurrying him as if he were
late for his train. (The jailer hurried him because he was counting
on licking out whatever was left in the jars.) Everything was
temporary in the church cells, without that illusion of permanency
which existed in the interrogation cells and in the cells where
prisoners awaited sentencing. Ground meat, a semiprocessed

From Island to Island | 607

product partially prepared for Gulag, the prisoners were unavoid-
ably here those few days until a bit of space had been cleared
for them at Krasnaya Presnya. They had just one special privilege
here: three times a day they were allowed to go for their gruel
themselves (no grits were given out here, but the gruel was served
three times a day, and this was a merciful thing because it was
more frequent, hotter, and stuck to the ribs better). This special
privilege was allowed because there were no elevators in the
church—as there were in the rest of the prison. And the jailers
had no wish to exert themselves. The big heavy kettles had to be
carried from a long way off, across the yard, and then up a steep
flight of stairs. It was hard work, and the prisoners had very little
strength for it, but they went willingly—just to get out into the
green yard one more time and hear the birds singing.

The church cells had their own air: it held a fluttering presenti-
ment of the drafts of future transit prisons, of the winds of the
Arctic camps. In the church cells you celebrated the ritual of
getting adjusted—to the fact that your sentence had been handed
down and that it wasn’t in the least a joke; to the fact that no
matter how cruel the new era of your life might be, your mind
must nevertheless digest and accept it. And you arrived at that
with great difficulty.

And you had no permanent cellmates here as you did in the
interrogation cells—which made the latter something like a
family. Day and night, people were brought in and taken away
singly and by tens, and as a result the prisoners kept moving
ahead along the floor and along the bunks, and it was rare to lie
next to any one neighbor for more than two nights. Once you met
an interesting person there you had to question him immediately,
because otherwise you would miss out for good and all.

And that is how I missed out on the automobile mechanic
Medvedev. When I began to talk to him, I remembered that his
name had been mentioned by the Emperor Mikhail. Yes, he had
indeed been implicated in the same case as Mikhail, because he
had been one of the first to read the “Manifesto to the Russian
People”—and had failed to write a denunciation. Medvedev had
been given an unforgivably, shamefully light sentence—three
years. And under Article 58, too, for which even five years was
considered a juvenile sentence. They had evidently decided the

608 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

Emperor was really insane, and had been easy on the rest of them
because of class considerations. But I had hardly pulled myself
together to ask how Medvedev regarded all this than they took
him off “with his things.” Certain circumstances led us to con-
clude that he had been taken off to be released. And this con-
firmed those first rumors of the Stalinist amnesty which reached
our ears that summer, the amnesty for no one, an amnesty after
which everything was just as crowded as before—even under the
bunks.

They took my neighbor, an elderly Schutzbiindler, off to a
prisoner transport. (Here in the land of the world proletariat, all
those Schutzbiindlers who had been suffocating in conservative
Austria had been roasted with “tenners,” and on the islands
of the Archipelago they met their end.) And there was a swarthy
little fellow with coal-black hair and feminine-looking eyes like
dark cherries, but with a broad, larger than usual nose that
spoiled his whole face, turning it into a caricature. For a day he
and I lay next to each other in silence, and on the second day he
found occasion to ask me: “What do you think I am?” He spoke
Russian correctly and fluently, but with an accent. I hesitated:
there seemed to be something of Transcaucasia in him, Armenian
presumably. He smiled: “I used to pass myself off very easily as
a Georgian. My name was Yasha. Everyone laughed at me. I
collected trade-union dues.” I looked him over. His was truly a
comical figure: a half-pint, his face out of proportion, asym-
metrical, his smile amiable. And then suddenly he tensed up, his
features sharpened, his eyes narrowed and cut me like the stroke
of a black saber.

“I am an intelligence officer of the Rumanian General Staff!
Lieutenant Vladimirescu!”

I started—this was real dynamite. I had met a couple of hun-
dred fabricated spies, and I had never thought I might meet up
with a real one. I thought they didn’t exist.

According to his story, he was of an aristocratic family. From
the age of three he had been destined to serve on the General Staff.
At six he had entered the intelligence service school. Growing
up, he had picked his own field of future activity—the Soviet
Union, taking into account that here in Russia the most relentless
counterintelligence service in the world existed and that it was

From Island to [sland | 609

particularly difficult to work here because everyone suspected
everyone else. And, he now concluded, he had worked here not at
all badly. He had spent several prewar years in Nikolayev and,
it appears, had arranged for the Rumanian armies to capture a
shipyard intact. Subsequently he had been at the Stalingrad
Tractor Factory, and after that at the Urals Heavy Machinery
Factory. In the course of collecting trade-union dues he had
entered the office of the chief of a major division of the plant, had
shut the door behind him, and his idiotic smile had promptly left
his face, and that saber-sharp cutting expression had appeared:
“Ponomaryev! [And Ponomaryev was using an altogether different
name at the Urals Heavy Machinery Factory.] We have been
keeping track of you from Stalingrad on. You left your job there.
[He had been some kind of bigwig at the Stalingrad Tractor
Factory.] And you have set yourself up here under an assumed
name. You can choose—to be shot by your own people or to
work with us.” Ponomaryev chose to work with them, and that
indeed was very much in the style of those supersuccessful pigs.
The lieutenant supervised his work until he himself was trans-
ferred to the jurisdiction of the German intelligence officer resi-
dent in Moscow, who sent him to Podolsk to work at his specialty.
As Vladimirescu explained to me, intelligence officers and sa-
boteurs are given an all-round training, but each of them has his
own narrow area of specialization. And Vladimirescu’s special
field was cutting the main cord of a parachute on the inside. In
Podolsk he was met at the parachute warehouse by the chief of
the warehouse guard (who was it? what kind of person was he?),
who at night let Vladimirescu into the warehouse for eight hours.
Climbing up to the piles of parachutes on his ladder and manag-
ing not to disturb the piles, Vladimirescu pulled out the braided
main support-cord and, with special scissors, cut four-fifths of the
way through it, leaving one-fifth intact, so that it would break in
the air. Vladimirescu had studied many long years in preparation
for this one night. And now, working feverishly, in the course of
eight hours he ruined, according to his account, upwards of two
thousand parachutes (fifteen seconds per parachute?). “I de-
stroyed a whole Soviet parachute division!” His cherrylike eyes
sparkled with malice.

When he was arrested, he refused to give any testimony for

610 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

eight whole months—imprisoned in the Butyrki, he uttered not
one word. “And didn’t they torture you?” “No!” His lips twitched
as though to indicate he didn’t even consider such a thing possible
in the case of a non-Soviet citizen. (Beat your own people so
foreigners will be more afraid of you! But a real spy’s a gold
mine! After all, we may have to use him for an exchange.) The
day came when they showed him the newspapers: Rumania had
capitulated; come on, now, testify. He continued to keep silent:
the newspapers could have been forgeries. They showed him an
order of the Rumanian General Staff: under the conditions of the
armistice the General Staff ordered all its intelligence agents to
cease operations and surrender. He continued to keep silent.
(The order could have been a forgery.) Finally he was con-
fronted with his immediate superior on the General Staff, who
ordered him to disclose his information and surrender. At this
point Vladimirescu coldbloodedly gave his testimony, and now,
in the slow passing of the cell day, it was no longer of any im-
portance and he told me some of it too. They had not even tried
him! They had not even given him a sentence! (After all, he
wasn’t one of our own! “I am a career man—and will remain one
until I die. And they won’t waste me.”)

“But you are revealing yourself to me,” I pointed out. “I might
very well remember your face. Just imagine our meeting someday
in public.”

“If I am convinced that you haven’t recognized me, you will
remain alive. If you recognize me, I will kill you, or else force you
to work for us.”

He had not the slightest desire to spoil his relationship with his
cell neighbor. He said this very simply, with total conviction.
I was really convinced that he wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to
gun someone down or cut their throat. |

In this whole long prisoners’ chronicle, we will not again meet
such a hero. It was the only encounter of the sort I ever had in my
eleven years of prison, camp, and exile, and others didn’t even
have one. And our mass-circulation comics try to dupe young
people into believing that these are the only people the Organs
catch.

It was enough to look around that church cell to grasp that it
was youth itself the Organs were catching in the first place. The

From Island to Island | 611

war had ended, and we could allow ourselves the luxury of ar-
resting everyone who had been singled out: they were no longer
needed as soldiers. They said that in 1944 and 1945 a so-called
“Democratic Party” had passed through the cells of the Small
(Moscow Province) Lubyanka. According to rumor, it had
consisted of half a hundred boys, had its own statutes and its
membership cards. The eldest of them was a pupil in the tenth
grade of a Moscow school, and he was its “general secretary.”
Students were also glimpsed fleetingly in the prisons during the
last year of the war. I met some here and there. I was pre-
sumably not old myself, but they at any rate were younger.

How imperceptibly all that crept up on us! While we—I, my
codefendant, and others of our age—had been fighting for four
years at the front, a whole new generation had grown up here in
the rear. And had it been very long since we ourselves had
tramped the parquet floors of the university corridors, consider-
ing ourselves the youngest and most intelligent in the whole
country and, for that matter, on earth? And then suddenly pale
youths crossed the tile floors of the prison cells to approach us
haughtily, and we learned with astonishment that we were no
longer the youngest and most intelligent—they were. But I didn’t
take offense at this; at that point I was already happy to move
over a bit to make room. I knew so very well their passion for
arguing with everyone, for finding out everything, I understood
their pride in having chosen a worthy lot and in not regretting it.
It gave me gooseflesh to hear the rustle of the prison halos hover-
ing over those self-enamored and intelligent little faces.

One month earlier, in another Butyrki cell, a semihospital
cell, I had just stepped into the aisle and had still not seen any
empty place for myself—when, approaching in a way that hinted
at a verbal dispute, even at an entreaty to enter into one, came a
pale, yellowish youth, with a Jewish tenderness of face, wrapped,
despite the summer, in a threadbare soldier’s overcoat shot full of
holes: he was chilled. His name was Boris Gammerov. He began
to question me; the conversation rolled along: on one hand, our
biographies, on the other, politics. I don’t remember why, but I
recalled one of the prayers of the late President Roosevelt, which
had been published in our newspapers, and I expressed what
seemed to me a self-evident evaluation of it:

612 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

“Well, that’s hypocrisy, of course.”

And suddenly the young man’s yellowish brows trembled, his
pale lips pursed, he seemed to draw himself up, and he asked me:
“Why? Why do you not admit the possibility that a political leader
might sincerely believe in God?”

And that is all that was said! But what a direction the attack
had come from! To hear such words from someone born in 1923?
I could have replied to him very firmly, but prison had already
undermined my certainty, and the principal thing was that some
kind of clean, pure feeling does live within us, existing apart from
all our convictions, and right then it dawned upon me that I had
not spoken out of conviction but because the idea had been im-
planted in me from outside. And because of this I was unable to
reply to him, and I merely asked him: “Do you believe in God?”

“Of course,” he answered tranquilly.

Of course? Of course . . . Yes, yes. The Komsomols were flying
ahead of the flock—everywhere, but so far only the NKGB had
noticed.

Notwithstanding his youth, Borya Gammerov had not only
fought as a sergeant in an antitank unit with those antitank 45’s
the soldiers had christened “Farewell, Motherland!” He had also
been wounded in the lungs and the wound had not yet healed,
and because of this TB had set in. Gammerov was given a medical
discharge from the army and enrolled in the biology department
of Moscow University. And thus two strands intertwined in him:
one from his life as a soldier and the other from the by no means
foolish and by no means dead students’ life at war’s end. A circle
formed of those who thought and reasoned about the future (even
though no one had given them any instructions to do so), and the
experienced eye of the Organs singled out three of them and
pulled them in. (In 1937, Gammerov’s father had been killed in
prison or shot, and his son was hurrying along the same path.
During the interrogation he had read several of his own verses to
the interrogator with feeling. And I deeply regret that I have
not managed to remember even one of them, and there is nowhere
to seek them out today. Otherwise I would have cited them
here. )

For a number of months after that my path crossed those of all
three codefendants: right there in a Butyrki cell I met Vyacheslav
D.—and there is always someone like him when young people

From Island to Island | 613

are arrested: he had taken an iron stand within the group, but
he quickly broke down under interrogation. He got less than any
of the others—five years—and it looked as though he were
secretly counting a good deal on his influential papa to get
him out.

And then in the Butyrki church I encountered Georgi Ingal,
the eldest of the three. Despite his youth, he was already a candi-
date-member of the Union of Soviet Writers. He had a very bold
pen. His style was one of strong contrasts. If he had been willing
to make his peace politically, vivid and untrodden literary paths
would have opened up before him. He had already nearly finished
a novel about Debussy. But his early success had not emasculated
him, and at the funeral of his teacher, Yuri Tynyanov, he had
made a speech declaring that Tynyanov had been persecuted—
and by this means had assured himself of an eight-year term.

And right then Gammerov caught up with us, and, while wait-
ing to go to Krasnaya Presnya, I had to face up to their united
point of view. This confrontation was not easy for me. At the
time I was committed to that world outlook which is incapable
of admitting any new fact or evaluating any new opinion before
a label has been found for it from the already available stock:
be it the “hesitant duplicity of the petty bourgoisie,” or the
“militant nihilism of the déclassé intelligentsia.” I don’t recall
that Ingal and Gammerov attacked Marx in my presence, but
I do remember how they attacked Lev Tolstoi, and from what
direction the attack was launched! Tolstoi rejected the church?
But he failed to take into account its mystical and its organizing
role. He rejected the teachings of the Bible? But for the most part
modern science was not in conflict with the Bible, not even with
its opening lines about the creation of the world. He rejected the
state? But without the state there would be chaos. He preached
the combining of mental and physical work in one individual’s
life? But that was a senseless leveling of capabilities and talents.
And, finally, as we see from Stalin’s violence, an historical per-
sonage can be omnipotent, yet Tolstoi scoffed at the very idea.*

4. In my preprison and prison years I, too, had long ago come to the
conclusion that Stalin had set the course of the Soviet state in a fateful direc-
tion. But then Stalin died quietly—and did the ship of state change course
very noticeably? The personal, individual imprint he left on events consisted
of dismal stupidity, petty tyranny, self-glorification. And in all the rest he
followed the beaten path exactly as it had been signposted, step by step.

614 | THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO

The boys read me their own verses and demanded mine in
exchange, and I as yet had none. They read Pasternak particu-
larly, whom they praised to the skies. I had once read “My Sister
Life” and hadn’t liked it, considering it precious, abstruse, and
very, very far from ordinary human paths. But they recited to me
Lieutenant Shmidt’s last speech at his trial, and it touched me
deeply because it applied so to us:

For thirty years I have nurtured
My love for my native land,

And I shall neither expect

Nor miss your leniency.

Gammerov and Ingal were just as shiningly attuned as that: We
do not need your leniency! We are not languishing from imprison-
ment; we are proud of it. (But who is really capable of not lan-
guishing? After a few months Ingal’s young wife renounced and
abandoned him. Gammerov, because of his revolutionary inclina-
tions, did not even have a sweetheart yet.) Was it not here, in
these prison cells, that the great truth dawned? The cell was con-
stricted, but wasn’t freedom even more constricted? Was it not
our own people, tormented and deceived, that lay beside us there
under the bunks and in the aisles?

Not to arise with my whole land
Would have been harder still,

And for the path that I have trod
I have no qualms at all.

The young people imprisoned in these cells under the political
articles of the Code were never the average young people of the
nation, but were always separated from them by a wide gap. In
those years most of our young people still faced a future of “dis-
integrating,” of becoming disillusioned, indifferent, falling in love
with an easy life—and then, perhaps, beginning all over again
the bitter climb from that cozy little valley up to a new peak—
possibly after another twenty years? But the young prisoners of
1945, sentenced under 58-10, had leaped that whole future chasm
of indifference in one jump—and bore their heads boldly erect
under the ax.

In the Butyrki church, the Moscow students, already sentenced,

From Island to Island | 615

cut off and estranged from everything, wrote a song, and before
twilight sang it in their uncertain voices:

Three times a day we go for gruel,
The evenings we pass in song,

With a contraband prison needle

We sew ourselves bags for the road.

We don’t care about ourselves any more,
We signed—just to be quicker!

And when will we ever return here again
From the distant Siberian camps?

Good Lord, how could we have missed the main point of the
whole thing? While we had been plowing through the mud out
there on the bridgeheads, while we had been cowering in shell
holes and pushing binocular periscopes above the bushes, back
home a new generation had grown up and gotten moving. But
hadn’t it started moving in another direction? In a direction we
wouldn’t have been able and wouldn’t have dared to move in?
They weren’t brought up the way we were. |

Our generation would return—having turned in its weapons,
jingling its heroes’ medals, proudly telling its combat stories. And
our younger brothers would only look at us contemptuously:
Oh, you stupid dolts!

END OF PART II

Translator s Notes

These translator’s notes are not intended to overlap the exten-
sive explanatory and reference material contained in the author’s
own notes in the text and in the glossary which follows. They
attempt to give that minimum of factual material about this book
and the whole work of which it is a part which will enable the
reader better to put it in perspective and understand what it is,
and also to deal with several areas of special Russian terminology.

The glossary which follows these notes can be very useful. It
gives in alphabetical order capsule identification of persons, in-
stitutions and their acronyms, political movements, and events
mentioned in the text.

The title of the book in Russian—Arkhipelag GULag—has a
resonance resulting from a rhyme which cannot be rendered in
English.

The image evoked by this title is that of one far-flung “country”
with millions of “natives,” consisting of an archipelago of islands,
some as tiny as a detention cell in a railway station and others as
vast as a large Western European country, contained within
another country—the U.S.S.R. This archipelago is made up of
the enormous network of penal institutions and all the rest of the
web of machinery for police oppression and terror imposed
throughout the author’s period of reference on all Soviet life.
Gulag is the acronym for the Chief Administration of Corrective
Labor Camps which supervised the larger part of this system.

616

Translator's Notes | 617

The author’s decision to publish this work was triggered by a
tragedy of August, 1973: A Leningrad woman to whom the
author had entrusted a portion of his manuscript for safekeeping
broke down after 120 sleepless hours of intensive questioning by
Soviet Security officers and revealed where she had hidden it—
enabling them to seize it. Thereupon, in her desperation and
depression, she committed suicide. It is to this event that the
author refers in the statement that precedes the text: “Now that
State Security has seized the book anyway, I have no alternative
but to publish it immediately.”

This present English-language edition of Parts I and II of The
Gulag Archipelago differs very slightly, as a result of author’s
corrections and other corrections, from the Russian-language first
edition of these parts which was published by the YMCA-Press
in Paris in late December, 1973.

The Gulag Archipelago is a sweeping, panoramic work which
consists in all of seven parts divided into three volumes—of which
this present book, the first volume, contains two parts, represent-
ing about one-third of the whole.

One of the important aspects of Solzhenitsyn as a Russian
literary figure is his contribution to the revival and expansion
of the Russian literary language through introducing readers in
his own country (and abroad) to the language, terminology, and
slang of camps, prisons, the police, and the underworld. Millions
of Soviet citizens became fully familiar with a whole new vocabu-
lary through imprisonment. But this vocabulary did not find its
way into Russian literature until Solzhenitsyn put it there—to
the bewilderment of some of the uninitiated.

In this category there are terms in this book which require
explanation.

Soviet Security services personnel, for example, are referred
to in a variety of special epithets, some of them carrying overtones
of contempt. Most of these have been manufactured from the
various initials, at one time and another, of the basic Soviet secret
police organization:

The oldest of these terms is, of course, “Chekist”—-pronounced
“Che-keest,” with the accent on the last syllable—from “Cheka.”
Though the name “Cheka” was replaced more than half a century
ago, this label for Soviet Security personnel is still used—and is
much beloved by the personnel of the Organs themselves.

618 | TRANSLATOR’S NOTES

“Gaybist,” which is pronounced “gay-beest,” with the accent
on the last syllable, is derived from the letters “g” and “b” stand-
ing for State Security.

Likewise “Gaybéshnik”—pronounced “gay-besh-neek,” with
the accent on the second syllable.

“Emvaydéshnik”—pronounced as it is spelled here, with the
accent on the third syllable—is derived similarly from the Rus-
sian pronunciation of the letters “M” “V” “D”—for Ministry of
Internal Affairs.

“Gaypayooshnik”—accent also on the third syllable—comes
from “G” “P” “U” or “Gaypayoo.”

“Qsobist”—pronounced “oh-so-beest,” with accent on the last
syllable—is an officer of the Special Branch, representing State
Security, usually in a military unit—the “Osdby Otdél.”

All these terms have their pungent flavor, which comes through
even to the English-speaking reader—and they have therefore
often been used as is in the text of this translation.

In the Gulag world there was one particular type of police
official who had special significance. This was the “operupolno-
mochenny”—“6per” for short. Literally rendered, this title means
“operations plenipotentiary”—the operations being Security oper-
ations, often in a forced-labor camp, where he had enormous
power deriving from the fact that he represented State Security
in an institution under the Ministry of Internal Affairs. His nick-
name among the prisoners was “Kum,” which can be translated
approximately as “godfather” or “father confessor.” He was in
charge of all camp stool pigeons and he had responsibility for
the political supervision of all the prisoners. Throughout this
work his title has been translated as “Security operations officer”
or more usually just “Security officer,” or “Security chief.”

The Russian thieves are not just plain ordinary thieves, but
constitute a whole underworld subculture which gets much atten-
tion and is well described in this book. The Russian thieves are
“vory”—meaning thieves. They are also the “blatnye” (plural);
“blatnoi” is the masculine singular form and also the adjective,
describing a thing or person attached to the underworld or to the
law or companionship of thieves.

The Russian thieves are also the “blatarf’ and the “úrki.”
They are also “tsvetnye’—in other words “colored.” And a

Translator’s Notes | 619

person “polutsvetndoi”—“half-colored” or “mulatto”—1is a non-
thief who has begun to take up the ways of the thieves.

By and large, to the extent that these and other terms appear
in their original form in this translation they are clearly enough
explained. But wherever the word “thief” appears it means one
of the “blatnye.”

The language of the Russian thieves is used in this work to
refer to much more than themselves.

Thus a nonthief in thief language is a “frayer.” By virtue of
being a nonthief he is also naturally “a mark,” “a cull,” “a
pigeon,” “an innocent,” “a sucker.” In this translation, “frayer”
has been rendered throughout as “sucker.”

Some other terms that relate to the world of Gulag require
special explanation:

At times in the text “ugolévniki” (which we have translated
as “habitual criminals”) and “bytoviki” (which we have trans-
lated as “nonpolitical offenders”) have been grouped together in
contrast to the political prisoners.

A “bytovik” is any prisoner who is not a political nor one of
the Russian thieves—and the “bytoviki” or “nonpolitical offend-
ers” make up the enormous main mass of the prisoners. The
distinction here is just as much psychological as legal, and in
English there is nothing that exactly translates this Russian term.

The “ugolévniki” or “habitual criminals” are obviously pro-
fessionals and therefore approximately the same as the thieves.

Chapter 3 in Part I is entitled in Russian “Slédstviye.” The
correct, legally formal rendering of this word into English would
be “investigation.” The official conducting the “investigation” is
a “slédovatel” or, again in the formal rendering, “investigator.”
I have, however, chosen, deliberately and after consideration and
consultation, generally to translate these Russian terms respec-
tively as “interrogation” and “interrogator.” The text of the book
makes the reason amply clear. There was in the period and the
cases described here no content of “investigation” in this process,
nor was there anyone who could legitimately be called an “in-
vestigator.” There was interrogation and there were interrogators.

In camps prisoners were divided into those who went out on
general-assignment work every day—and therefore died off—
and those who got “cushy” jobs within the camp compound at

39 oc

620 | TRANSLATOR’S NOTES

office work, as hospital orderlies, as cooks, bread cutters, assis-
tants in the mess hall, etc., etc.—and thereby were in a better
position to survive. These latter were contemptuously christened
by the other prisoners “pridúrki”—derived from a verb meaning
to shirk general-assignment work. I have here translated “pri-
dúrki” as “trusties.” As in many other cases there is no exact
English equivalent, but this is certainly as close as there is.

Anyone who wishes to delve further into the lingo of Russian
thieves and camps can well make use of the valuable book Soviet
Prison Camp Speech, a Survivor's Glossary, compiled by Meyer
Galler and Harlan E. Marquess, University of Wisconsin Press,
1972.

I wish to thank those who have given me invaluable assistance
with this translation—and in the first place and in particular
Frances Lindley, my experienced, able, and long-suffering editor
at Harper & Row; Dick Passmore, my brilliant copy editor;
Theodore Shabad, who has labored long and industriously over
the glossary and details in footnotes and text; and also Nina
Sobolev, for her long faithful hours of help of all kinds.

Michael Scammell, the well-known British translator and edi-
tor, was kind enough to come to New York during the final stages.
of the preparation of this manuscript and provide the benefit of
his own considerable experience in giving the text one last thor-
ough and most useful going over. I am deeply grateful to him.

There are several others who have done more for this project
than I can possibly thank them for. But I can at least try—in the
knowledge that they will know whom I mean when they read
these lines.

Yet with all this, if there are faults in this translation, as no
doubt there are, mine is the responsibility.

T.P.W.

Glossary

NAMES

Abakumov, Viktor Semyonovich (1894—1954). Stalin’s Minister of
State Security, 1946-1952. Executed in December, 1954, under
Khrushchev.

Agranov, Yakov Savlovich (?-1939). Deputy People’s Commissar
of Internal Affairs under Yagoda and Yezhov. Played important
role in preparing show trials of 1936—1938. Shot in purges.

Aikhenvald, Yuli Isayevich (1872—1928). Critic and essayist, trans-
lated Schopenhauer into Russian. Exiled in 1922.

Akhmatova (Gorenko), Anna Andreyevna (1889-1966). ERT
poet, wife of Nikolai Gumilyev. Denounced in 1946 as “alien to the
Soviet people.” Long unpublished in Soviet Union; some works
published after 1956.

Aldanov (Landau), Mark Aleksandrovich (1886—1957). Writer of
historical novels; emigrated 1919 to Paris, and later to New York.

Aldan-Semyonov, Andrei Ignatyevich (1908—). Soviet writer; im-
prisoned in Far East camps, 1938—1953. Author of memoirs.

Aleksandrov, A. I. Head of Arts Section of All-Union Society for
Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries; purged in 1935.

Alliluyevs. Family of Stalin’s second wife, Nadezhda Sergeyevna.

Amfiteatrov, Aleksandr Valentinovich (1862—1938). Russian writer;
emigrated 1920.

Anders, Wladyslaw (1892-1970). Polish general; formed Polish
military units in Soviet Union and led them out to Iran in 1943.

Andreyev, Leonid Nikolayevich (1871—1919). Playwright and short
story writer, close to Expressionism; died in Finland.

Andreyushkin, Pakhomi Ivanovich (1865-1887). Member of Narod-
naya Volya terrorist group; executed after attempt to assassinate
Alexander III in 1887.

Antonov-Saratovsky, Vladimir Pavlovich (1884—1965). Old Bolshe-

621

622 | GLOSSARY

vik, served as judge in Shakhty (1928) and Promparty (1930) trials.

Averbakh, I. L. Soviet jurist; associate of Vyshinsky.

Babushkin, Ivan Vasilyevich (1873—1906). Russian revolutionary.

Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich (1895—). Literary scholar, expert on
Dostoyevsky. Unpublished in Soviet Union from 1930 to 1963.

Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich (1814—1876). A founder of An-
archism.

Bandera, Stepan (1909-1959). Ukrainian nationalist; led anti-Soviet
forces in Ukraine after World War II until 1947; assassinated in
Munich by a Soviet agent.

Bedny, Demyan (1883—1945). Soviet poet.

Belinsky, Vissarion Grigoryevich (1811—1848). Literary critic and
ardent liberal, champion of socially-conscious literature.

Benois, Aleksandr Nikolayevich (1870-1960). Scenic designer; emi-
grated 1926 to Paris.

Berdyayev, Nikolai Aleksandrovich (1874-1948). Philosopher, reli-
gious thinker; opposed atheism and materialism. Expelled in 1922;
lived in Paris after 1924.

Beria, Lavrenti Pavlovich (1899-1953). Georgian Bolshevik, became
close Stalin associate in 1938, in charge of secret police and national
security. Executed after Stalin’s death.

Biron or Biren. Russian name of Count Ernst Johann Biihren
(1690-1772). A favorite of Empress Anna Ivanovna, under whom
he instituted a tyrannical rule.

Blok, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich (1880—1921). Symbolist poet.

Blücher, Marshal Vasily Konstantinovich (1890—1938). Commander
of Far East Military District, 1929-1938; shot in purge.

Blyumkin, Yakov Grigoryevich (1898—1929). A Left Socialist Revolu-
tionary; assassinated German Ambassador Mirbach in Moscow in
1918; later joined Cheka; executed after he took message from
Trotsky to Radek.

Boky, Gleb Ivanovich (1879—1941). Secret police official; member of
Supreme Court after 1927; arrested in 1937.

Bonch-Bruyevich, Vladimir Dmitriyevich (1873—1955). Bolshevik
revolutionary; administrative officer of Council of People’s Commis-
sars, 1917—1920.

Bondarin, Sergei Aleksandrovich (1903-). Children’s writer.

Budenny, Marshal Semyon Mikhailovich (1883—1973). Civil War
hero; commander of Bolshevik cavalry, commander Southwest
Front in early phase of World War II.

Bukharin, Nikolai Ivanovich (1888—1938). Prominent Party official
and economic theorist; member of Politburo after 1924 and general

Glossary | 623

secretary of Comintern after 1926; expelled from Party in 1929;
executed after 1938 show trial.

Bulgakov, Mikhail Afanasyevich (1891—1940). Satirist, most of whose
writings have not been published in Soviet Union.

Bulgakov, Sergei Nikolayevich (1871—1944). Religious philosopher;
exiled in 1922, lived in Paris.

Bunin, Ivan Alekseyevich (1870-1953). Writer; emigrated 1920 to
France; won Nobel Prize in 1933.

Bunyachenko, Sergei K. (?—-1946). Commander of 1st Division of
Vlasov’s forces in World War II; executed in Soviet Union in 1946.

Chamovsky, N. F. (1868—?). Soviet economic official, among de-
fendants in 1930 Promparty trial.

Chekhovsky, Vladimir Moiseyevich (1877—?). Ukrainian nationalist.

Chernov, Viktor Mikhailovich (1873—1952). Socialist Revolutionary
Party leader; emigrated in 1920.

Chubar, Vlas Yakovlevich (1891—1939). High Soviet Ukrainian of-
ficial; shot in purges.

Chukovskaya, Lidiya Komeyevna (1907-). Soviet literary critic and
writer (samizdat).

Dal (Dahl), Vladimir Ivanovich (1801—1872). Lexicographer.

Dan (Gurvich), Fyodor Ilyich (1871-1947). Menshevik leader,
physician; exiled in 1922.

Denikin, Anton Ivanovich (1872—1947). Tsarist military leader; com-
manded anti-Bolshevik (White) forces in south, 1918-1920; emi-
grated.

Derzhavin, Gavriil Romanovich (1743—1816). Poet and statesman
under Catherine II.

Dimitrov, Georgi Mikhailovich (1882-1949). Bulgarian Communist
leader; chief defendant in 1933 Reichstag trial in Leipzig.

Dolgun, Alexander M. (Alexander D.) (1926—). American-born former
employee of United States Embassy in Moscow; spent eight years
(1948-1956) in Soviet prisons and labor camps; allowed to leave
Soviet Union in 1971.

Donskoi, D. D. (1881—1936). Right Socialist Revolutionary.

Doyarenko, Aleksei G. Soviet agronomist; a defendant in Working
Peasants Party case of 1931.

Dukhonin, Nikolai Nikolayevich (1876—1917). Commander in Chief
of Tsarist Army; slain by soldiers.

Dyakov, Boris Aleksandrovich (1902—). Author of labor-camp mem-
oirs.

Dzerzhinsky, Feliks Edmundovich (1877-1926). First chief of the
secret police (Cheka-GPU-OGPU); succeeded by Menzhinsky.

624 | GLOSSARY

Ehrenburg, Ilya Grigoryevich (1891—1967). Soviet writer and journal-
ist; spent many years in Paris; author of memoirs of Stalin era.

Etinger, Y. G. (?-1952). Soviet physician, arrested in 1952 in so-
called “doctors’ case.” Died under interrogation.

Fedotov, A. A. (1864—?). A Soviet official; defendant in Shakhty trial.

Figner, Vera Nikolayevna (1852—1942). A leader of Narodnaya Volya
group, took part in successful conspiracy to assassinate Alexander
II in 1881.

Filonenko, Maksimilian Maksimilianovich. Right Socialist Revolu-
tionary; led anti-Bolshevik forces in Archangel in 1918.

Frank, Semyon Lyudvigovich (1877—1950). Religious philosopher,
pupil of Solovyev; exiled in 1922.

Fyodor Ivanovich (1557—1598). Halfwit son of Ivan the Terrible,
whom he succeeded in 1584. His regent was Boris Godunov, who
reigned as Tsar, 1598-1605.

Gaaz, Fyodor Petrovich (Haas, Friedrich-Joseph) (1780-1853). Ger-
man-born physician of Moscow prison hospital; sought penal re-
forms.

Gamarnik, Yan Borisovich (1894—1937). Soviet military leader who
committed suicide during purge.

Garin, N. (Mikhailovsky, Nikolai Georgiyevich) (1852—1906). Marxist
writer, who depicted young Tsarist engineers.

Gernet, Mikhail Nikolayevich (1874—?). Writer on the death pen-
alty.

Ginzburg, Yevgeniya Semyonovna (1911—). Author of labor-camp
memoirs, Journey into the Whirlwind.

Gippius, Zinaida Nikolayevna (1869—1945). Writer, wife of Merezh-
kovsky; emigrated in 1920.

Golikov, Marshal Filipp Ivanovich (1900—). Soviet military leader;
supervised repatriation of Red Army prisoners from Germany.

Golyakov, Ivan Terentyevich. Presiding judge of Supreme Court
under Stalin.

Gorky, Maxim (Peshkov, Aleksei Maksimovich) (1868—1936). Writer;
opposed Bolsheviks at first and lived abroad (1921—1928); returned
to Russia in 1931; died under mysterious circumstances.

Gots, Abram Rafailovich (1882—1940). A Right Socialist Revolu-
tionary leader; a defendant in 1922 trial.

Govorov, Marshal Leonid Aleksandrovich (1897—1955). Soviet mil-
itary leader. l

Griboyedov, Aleksandr Sergeyevich (1795—1829). Playwright and
diplomat.

Grigorenko, Pyotr Grigoryevich (1907—). Former Red Army general,
became a dissident in 1961; in mental asylums since 1969.

Glossary | 625

Grigoryev, Iosif Fyodorovich (1890-1949). Prominent Soviet geol-
Ogist.

Grin (Grinovsky), Aleksandr Stepanovich (1880-1932). Writer of
romantic, fantastic adventure stories.

Grinevitsky, Ignati loakhimovich (1856—1881). Revolutionary, mem-
ber of Narodnaya Volya group. Threw bomb that killed Alexander
II March 13, 1881; was himself mortally wounded.

Groman, Vladimir Gustavovich (1873—?). High Soviet economic of-
ficial; a defendant in 1931 trial of Mensheviks.

Gromyko, Andrei Andreyevich (1909-). Soviet diplomat; former
ambassador to United States and delegate to United Nations; For-
eign Minister since 1957.

Gul (Goul), Roman Borisovich (1896-). Émigré writer of historical
works; editor of Novy Zhurnal, a magazine published in New York.

Gumilyev, Nikolai Stepanovich (1886—1921). Acmeist poet, first hus-
band of Akhmatova; accused in anti-Soviet plot and executed.

Herzen, Aleksandr Ivanovich (1812—1870). Liberal writer.

Ilin, Ivan Aleksandrovich (1882—1954). Mystic philosopher, exiled
in 1922.

Ivan Kalita (?—1340). Founder of Grand Duchy of Muscovy.

Ivanov-Razumnik (Ivanov, Razumnik Vasilyevich) (1876—1946).
Left Socialist Revolutionary; served in Tsarist prison (1901) and in
Soviet labor camps; went to Germany in 1941.

Izgoyev (Lande), Aleksandr Solomonovich (1872—c.1938). A Right
Cadet writer; expelled from Soviet Union in 1922.

Izmailov, Nikolai Vasilyevich (1893—). Soviet literary scholar, editor
of Pushkin’s works.

Kaganovich, Lazar Moiseyevich (1893-). Close associate of Stalin, in
charge of railroads. Ousted from leadership in 1957.

Kalinin, Mikhail Ivanovich (1875—1946). Nominal President of Soviet
Union (1919-1946), first as Chairman of All-Russian Central
Executive Committee until 1922, then as Chairman of Central
Executive Committee of U.S.S.R., and after 1938 as Chairman of
Presidium of Supreme Soviet.

Kamenev (Rosenfeld), Lev Borisovich (1883—1936). Prominent Bol-
shevik leader, expelled from Party in 1927, readmitted and re-
expelled; executed after 1936 show trial.

Kaplan, Fanya (Dora) (1888—1918). A Left Socialist Revolutionary;
executed after unsuccessful attempt on Lenin’s life in 1918.

Karakozov, Dmitri Vladimirovich (1840—1866). Revolutionary; exe-
cuted after unsuccessful attempt on life of Alexander II in 1866.

Karsavin, Lev Platonovich (1882—1952). Mystic philosopher; expert
on medieval history; exiled in 1922.

626 | GLOSSARY

Kasso, Lev Aristidovich (1865—1914). Reactionary Minister of Educa-
tion under Nicholas II.

Katanyan, Ruben Pavlovich (1881—1966). Soviet state prosecuting
official in 1920’s and 1930’s; arrested 1938.

Kazakov, Ignati Nikolayevich (1891-1938). Physician accused of
having murdered Soviet officials through use of “lysates” (anti-
bodies); shot after 1938 show trial.

Kerensky, Aleksandr Fyodorovich (1881—1970). A Socialist Revolu-
tionary leader; headed Provisional Government, July to November,
1917; fled to France; died in New York.

Khrustalev-Nosar, Georgi Stepanovich (1877—1918). Elected Chair-
man of St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies in 1905; opposed
Bolsheviks in Ukraine in 1918; shot by Bolsheviks.

Kirov (Kostrikov), Sergei Mironovich (1886—1934). Close Stalin as-
sociate; his murder in Leningrad, reputedly inspired by Stalin, set
off wave of mass reprisals.

Kishkin, Nikolai Mikhailovich (1864—1930). A leader of Constitu-
tional Democratic Party; a defendant in 1921 trial of famine-relief
aides.

Kizevetter (Kiesewetter), Aleksandr Aleksandrovich (1866—1933).
Cadet leader and historian; expelled in 1922; lived in Prague.

Klyuchevsky, Vasily Osipovich (1841—1911). Prominent historian.

Klyuyev, Nikolai Alekseyevich (1887—1937). Peasant poet; glorified
ancient Russian values, opposing Western cultural influences; exiled
to Siberia in early 1930’s.

Kolchak, Aleksandr Vasilyevich (1873-1920). Tsarist admiral; led
anti-Bolshevik forces in Siberia, 1918—1920; executed.

Koltsov, Nikolai Konstantinovich (1872—1940). Prominent biologist:
founded experimental school in Russian biology.

Kondratyev, Nikolai Dmitriyevich (1892—?). Agricultural economist;
figure in Working Peasants Party case in 1931.

Kornilov, Lavr Georgiyevich (1870-1918). Commander in Chief of
Russian forces under Provisional Government; led revolt against
Kerensky in August, 1917; fought Bolsheviks in Don area; killed
in battle.

Korolenko, Vladimir Galaktionovich (1853-1921). Peasant demo-
cratic writer; persecuted under Tsars; viewed as bourgeois by Bol-
sheviks.

Kosarev, Aleksandr Vasilyevich (1903-1939). Leader of the Komso-
mol, 1929—1938.

Kosior, Stanislav Vikentyevich (1889-1939). Ukrainian Bolshevik
leader; shot in purges.

Glossary | 627

Kozyrev, Nikolai Aleksandrovich (1908—). Astronomer; in prison,
1937-1948.

Krasikov, Pyotr Ananyevich (1870—1939). Old Bolshevik; prosecuting
and justice official in 1920’s and 1930’s.

Krasnov (Levitin), Anatoly Emanuilovich (1915-—). Religious writer;
imprisoned under Stalin; in dissident movement after 1960.

Krasnov, Pyotr Nikolayevich (1869-1947). Don Cossack leader; emi-
grated in 1919; led pro-German Russian units in World War II;
handed over by Allies after war and executed in Soviet Union.

Krestinsky, Nikolai Nikolayevich (1883-1938). Bolshevik Party of-
ficial and diplomat; shot after 1938 show trial.

Kruglov, Sergei Nikiforovich (1903-). Minister of Interior, 1946—
1956.

Krylenko, Nikolai Vasilyevich (1885—1938). Chief state prosecutor,
1918-1931; later People’s Commissar of Justice; shot in 1938.

Krylov, Ivan Andreyevich (1769-1844). Noted fabulist.

Kuibyshev, Valerian Vladimirovich (1888—1935). Prominent eco-
nomic planning official; died under mysterious circumstances.

Kupriyanov, G. N. Karelian Party official; arrested in 1949.

Kursky, Dmitri Ivanovich (1874—1932). People’s Commissar of
Justice, 1918—1928; envoy to Italy, 1928—1932.

Kuskova, Yekaterina Dmitriyevna (1869-1958). Cadet, later SR;
figure in Famine Relief case 1921; exiled in 1922.

Kuznetsov, Aleksei Aleksandrovich (1905—1950). Lieutenant general,
one of the organizers of the defense of Leningrad, Secretary of the
Central Committee, convicted in connection with the Leningrad
Affair.

Kuznetsov, Col. Gen. Vasily Ivanovich (1894—1964). Soviet military
leader in World War II.

Lapshin, Ivan Ivanovich (1870—1948). Philosopher; exiled in 1922 to
Prague, where he died.

Larichev, Viktor A. (1887—?). Chairman, Main Fuels Committee;
figure in Promparty trial in 1930.

Larin, Y. (Lurye, Mikhail Aleksandrovich) (1882—1932). Agricultural
economist; former Menshevik; helped found Soviet planning system.

Latsis (Lacis), Martyn Ivanovich (Sudrabs, Yan Fridrikhovich) (1888—
1941). Early Cheka official, 1917-1921; director, Plekhanov Eco-
nomics Institute, 1932—1937; arrested 1937.

Lelyushenko, Dmitri Danilovich (1901—). Soviet World War II leader.

Lermontov, Mikhail Yuryevich (1814—1841). Liberal poet.

Levina, Revekka Saulovna (1899—1964). Soviet economist.

Levitan, Yuri Borisovich (1914—). Soviet radio announcer noted for

628 | GLOSSARY

his sonorous voice, which became familiar through announcement
of major Soviet successes in World War II and other news events.

Levitin. See Krasnov, A. E.

Likhachev, Nikolai Petrovich (1862—1935). Historian, specialist on
ikon painting.

Lomonosov, Mikhail Vasilyevich (1711—1765). Universal scholar; in
Russian spiritual history, prototype of scientific genius arising from
the people.

Lordkipanidze, G. S. (1881-1937). Georgian writer; died in purge.

Loris-Melikov, Mikhail Tarpelovich (1825-1888). Powerful Tsarist
Interior Minister, 1880-1881; initiator of unimplemented reforms.

Lorkh, Aleksandr Georgiyevich (1889—). Prominent potato breeder.

Lessky, Nikolai Onufriyevich (1870-1965). Philosopher; exiled in
1922.

Lozovsky, A. (Dridzo, Solomon Abramovich) (1878—1952). Revolu-
tionary; chief of Trade Union International, 1921-1937; Deputy
People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs and head of Sovinformburo.
in World War II; shot in anti-Jewish purge.

Lunacharsky, Anatoly Vasilyevich (1875—1932). Marxist: cultural
theorist; People’s Commissar for Education, 1917—1929.

Lunin, Mikhail Sergeyevich (1787-1845). One of the Decembrists;
wrote philosophical and political tracts in Siberian exile.

Lysenko, Trofim Denisovich (1898-). Agricultural biologist; virtual
dictator of Soviet science after 1940 under Stalin, and. of biology in
the Khrushchev era until 1964.

Maisky, Ivan Mikhailovich (1884—). Historian and diplomat; former
Menshevik; envoy to Britain, 1932—1943; Deputy Foreign Commis-
sar, 1943-1946.

Makarenko, Anton Semyonovich (1888—1939). Educator; organized
rehabilitation colonies for juvenile delinquents.

Malinovsky, Roman Vatslavovich (1876-1918). Tsarist police in-
former planted among Bolsheviks; emigrated in 1914; returned to
Russia voluntarily in 1918, when he was tried and executed.

Mandelstam, Osip Emilyevich (1891—1938). Acmeist poet; died in
transit camp.

Mariya, Mother. See Skobtsova.

Markos, Gen. Vafiades (1906-). Greek leftist rebel leader, 1947-
1948.

Martov (Tsederbaum), Yuli Osipovich (1873-1923). A Menshevik
leader; exiled by Lenin in 1921.

Mayakovsky, Vladimir Vladimirovich (1893—1930). Futurist poet;
suicide.

Glossary | 629

Meck, Nikolai Karlovich von (1863—1929). Tsarist railroad industrial-
ist; worked for Bolsheviks after 1917; accused of counterrevolu-
tionary activities and shot.

Melgunov, Sergei Petrovich (1879-1956). Historian and Popular
Socialist leader; exiled in 1923; lived in Paris.

Menshikov, Aleksandr Danilovich (1673—1729). Military leader and
statesman; favorite of Peter the Great and Catherine I.

Menzhinsky, Vyacheslav Rudolfovich (1874-1934). Secret police of-
ficial; headed OGPU, 1926-1934.

Meretskov, Marshal Kirill Afanasyevich (1897—1968). World War II
leader.

Merezhkovsky, Dmitri Sergeyevich (1865-1941). Philosopher and
novelist; founder of Symbolist movement; emigrated 1919 to Paris.

Mikhailov, Nikolai Aleksandrovich (1906—). Chief of Komsomol,
1938-1952; later envoy to Poland and Indonesia, Minister of Cul-
ture, chairman of State Publishing Committee; retired 1970.

Mikolajczyk, Stanislaw (1901-1966). Polish Peasant Party leader; in
Polish government in exile during World War II; in Polish postwar
government, 1945-1947.

Mikoyan, Anastas Ivanovich (1895—). Close associate of Stalin; in
charge of consumer-goods area; foreign policy adviser to Khru-
shchev; retired 1966.

Milyukov, Pavel Nikolayevich (1859-1943). Leader of Constitutional
Democratic Party and historian; emigrated in 1920; died in U.S.A.

Mirovich, Vasily Yakovlevich (1740—1764). Attempted palace coup
under Catherine II in favor of pretender Ivan IV Antonovich.

Molotov (Skryabin), Vyacheslav Mikhailovich (1890—). Close associ-
ate of Stalin; served as Premier and Foreign Minister; ousted by
Khrushchev after so-called 1957 anti-Party coup; retired.

Monomakh. See Vladimir II.

Myakotin, Venedikt Aleksandrovich (1867-1937). Historian and a
founder of Popular Socialist Party; exiled in 1922.

Nabokov (Sirin), Vladimir (1899-). Russian-American writer; son of
F. D. Sirin, a Cadet leader, who emigrated in 1919.

Narokov (Marchenko), Nikolai Vladimirovich (1887—1969). Emigré
writer; left Soviet Union in World War II; lived in Monterey, Calif.

Natanson, Mark Andreyevich (1850—1919). Populist, later a Socialist
Revolutionary; sided with Bolsheviks during World War I; died in
Switzerland.

Nekrasov, Nikolai Alekseyevich (1821—1878). Civic poet.

Novikov, Nikolai Ivanovich (1744—1818). Writer and social critic;
incarcerated in Schliisselburg Fortress under Catherine II.

630 | GLOSSARY

Novorussky, Mikhail Vasilyevich (1861—1925). Revolutionary, con-
victed with Aleksandr Ulyanov after abortive attempt to assassinate
Alexander III in 1887; death sentence commuted to imprisonment
in Schliisselburg.

Obolensky, Yevgeny Petrovich (1796—1865). One of the Decembrists;
death sentence commuted to 20 years’ Siberian exile.

Olitskaya, Yekaterina Lvovna (1898—). Soviet dissident writer whose
prison-camp memoirs circulated in samizdat and were published in
1971 by Possev, .Russian-language publishing house of Frankfurt,
West Germany.

Olminsky (Aleksandrov), Mikhail Stepanovich (1863-1933). Early
professional revolutionary, journalist.

Ordzhonikidze, Grigory (Sergo) Konstantinovich (1886—1937). Close
associate of Stalin, charged with heavy industry; a suicide during
purges.

Osorgin (Ilin), Mikhail Andreyevich (1878—1942). Writer; exiled in
1922.

Palchinsky, Pyotr Akimovich (1878—1929). Economist and mining
engineer; chief defendant in Shakhty trial of 1928; shot.

Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich (1890—1960). Poet and novelist; 1958
Nobel laureate.

Perkhurov, Aleksandr Petrovich (1876—1922). Anti-Bolshevik mili-
tary commander; shot in Yaroslavl in 1922.

Peshekhonoy, Aleksei Vasilyevich (1867—1933). Writer; exiled in
1922.

Peshkova-Vinaver, Yekaterina Pavlovna (1876—1965). First wife of
Maxim Gorky; headed Political Red Cross.

Pestel, Pavel Ivanovich (1793—1826). One of the Decembrists, leader
of radical wing; hanged.

Peters, Yakov Khristoforovich (1886-1942). Latvian revolutionary;
high secret police official in 1920's; liquidated.

Petlyura, Simon Vasilyevich (1879-1926). Ukrainian nationalist
leader; headed anti-Bolshevik forces in Ukraine, 1918—1919; assas-
sinated in Paris exile.

Pilnyak (Vogau), Boris Andreyevich (1894—1937). Soviet writer; ac-
cused of distorting revolutionary events; died in prison.

Platonov, Sergei Fyodorovich (1860-1933). Historian; in official dis-
favor in early 1930's.

Plekhanov, Georgi Valentinovich (1856—1918). Marxist philosopher
and historian, became a Menshevik leader; opposed Bolsheviks’
1917 coup.

Pletnev, Dmitri Dmitriyevich (1872—1953). Physician; sentenced to
25 years after 1938 show trial.

Glossary | 631

Pobedonostsev, Konstantin Petrovich (1827—1907). Lawyer and poli-
tician; Procurator of the Holy Synod; his reactionary Russian na-
tionalist views were influential under Alexander III and in the early
reign of Nicholas II.

Postyshev, Pavel Petrovich (1887—1940). Ukrainian Bolshevik leader;
arrested in 1938; died in prison.

Potemkin, Grigory Aleksandrovich (1739-1791). Military leader and
favorite of Catherine the Great.

Prokopovich, Sergei Nikolayevich (1871-1955). Economist and a
Cadet leader; figure in 1921 Famine Relief Commission trial; ex-
pelled 1922.

Ptukhin, Lieut. Gen. Yevgeny Savvich (1900—1941). Soviet Air Force
commander; executed after German attack against Soviet Union.

Pugachev, Yemelyan Ivanovich (1742-1775). Leader of a major
peasant revolt against Catherine II; executed.

Radek, Karl Berngardovich (1885-1939). Comintern official, later
journalist; shot after 1937 show trial.

Radishchev, Aleksandr Nikolayevich (1749-1802). Writer and social
critic; exiled to Siberia by Catherine II.

Rakovsky, Khristian Georgiyevich (1873-1941). Bolshevik official
who served as Ukrainian Premier, 1919-1923, and diplomat, 1923-
1927; imprisoned after 1938 show trial; daughter Yelena arrested
1948.

Ramzin, Leonid Konstantinovich (1887—1948). Heat engineer; princi-
pal defendant in 1930 Promparty trial; death sentence commuted to
10 years; professionally active again during World War II.

Ransome, Arthur (1884—1967). British journalist; wrote on Bolshevik
Revolution.

Raskolnikov (Ilin), Fyodor Fyodorovich (1892-1939). Bolshevik
diplomat; defected in France; died under mysterious circumstances.

Rasputin, Grigory Yefimovich (1872—1916). Adventurer with strong
influence over family of Nicholas II; killed by courtiers.

Razin, Stepan Timofeyevich (Stenka) (16307-1671). Leader of a
Cossack and peasant rebellion in the middle and lower Volga ter-
ritories, he was defeated and executed; legendary figure in Russian
national poetry.

Reilly, Sidney George (1874—1925). British intelligence officer; killed
while crossing Soviet-Finnish border.

Repin, Ilya Yefimovich (1844—1930). Prominent painter; one of his
works depicts the Volga boatmen.

Rokossovsky, Marshal Konstantin Konstantinovich (1896—1968).
Soviet World War II leader; Defense Minister in Poland, 1949-—
1956.

632 | GLOSSARY

Romanov, Panteleimon Sergeyevich (1884—1938). Soviet satirist.

Rudzutak, Yan Emestovich (1887—1938). Associate of Stalin; arrested
1937; died in prison.

Ryabushinsky, Pavel Pavlovich (1871-1924). Russian industrialist
and anti-Bolshevik leader; mentioned in 1930 Promparty trial.

Rykov, Aleksei Ivanovich (1881-1938). Close associate of Stalin;
Premier of Soviet Union, 1924—1930; shot after 1938 show trial.

Ryleyev, Kondrati Fyodorovich (1795-1826). A Decembrist; hanged.

Rysakov, Nikolai Ivanovich (1861—1881). A revolutionary of Narod-
naya Volya group; executed after assassination of Alexander II in
1881.

Ryumin, M. D. (?-1953). Secret police official who engineered the
“doctors’ case”; executed 1953.

Ryurik. Legendary Varangian prince who came to Novgorod in mid-
ninth century and founded first Russian dynasty.

Sakharov, Col. Igor K. Emigré who commanded pro-German Russian
military unit in World War II.

Saltychikha (Saltykova, Darya Nikolayevna) (1730—1801). Woman
landowner in Moscow Province; noted for cruel treatment of serfs.

Samsonov, Aleksandr Vasilyevich (1859-1914). Tsarist general; sui-
cide after his forces were defeated in East Prussia in World
War I.

Savinkov, Boris Viktorovich (1879-1925). A Socialist Revolutionary
leader; arrested after he re-entered Russia illegally in 1924.

Savva (1327—1406). Russian Orthodox saint; pupil of Sergius of
Radonezh.

Sedin, Ivan K. People’s Commissar for Petroleum in World War II.

Selivanov, Dmitri Fyodorovich (1885-7). Mathematician; emigrated
1922.

Serebryakova, Galina Iosifovna (1905-). Writer; author of camp
memoirs.

Sergius of Radonezh (1321-1391). Russian Orthodox saint; founded
monasteries, including Trinity-St. Sergius at Zagorsk, near his home
town, Radonezh.

Serov, Ivan Aleksandrovich (1905-). Secret police official; chairman of
KGB, 1954-1958.

Shalamov, Varlam Tikhonovich (1907—). Writer; spent 17 years in
Kolyma camps; author of Kolyma Stories (Paris, 1969).

Shchastny, Captain Aleksei Mikhailovich (?—1918). Commander of
Red Baltic Fleet; executed.

Shcherbakov, Alekandr Sergeyevich (1901—1945). Close associate of
Stalin; Moscow city secretary, 1938—1945; Chief of Red Army’s
Political Department, 1942-1945.

Glossary | 633

Sheinin, Ley Romanovich (1906—1967). Soviet prosecuting and in-
vestigatory Official; wrote spy stories after 1950.

Sheshkovsky, Stepan Ivanovich (1727-1793). Judicial investigator
under Catherine II; known for harsh interrogatory techniques.

Shmidt, Pyotr Petrovich (1867—1906). Lieutenant in Black Sea Fleet;
executed after Sevastopol revolt.

Sholokhov, Mikhail Aleksandrovich (1905—). Soviet writer; 1965
Nobel laureate.

Shulgin, Vasily Vitalyevich (1878—1965). Monarchist; emigrated after
1917 Revolution; caught by Red Army in Yugoslavia at end of
World War IT; served 10 years in labor camp.

Shvernik, Nikolai Mikhailovich (1888-1970). Associate of Stalin;
trade-union chief, 1930—1944 and 1953-1956; President of Soviet
Union, 1946-1953.

Sikorski, Wladyslaw (1881-1943). Military leader of Polish exiles.

Skobtsova, Yelizaveta Yuryevna (1892-1945). Acmeist poet; emi-
grated to Paris, where she became a nun (Mother Mariya); died in
Nazi camp.

Skrypnik, Nikolai Alekseyevich (1872—1933). Ukrainian People’s
Commissar for Justice (1922—1927) and Education (1927—1933);
suicide.

Skuratov, Malyuta (Belsky, Grigory Lukyanovich) (?—1572). Trusted
aide of Ivan the Terrible; personifies Ivan’s cruelties,; headed
Oprichnina, a policelike organization.

Smirnov, Ivan Nikitovich (1881—1936). Soviet People’s Commissar
for Communications, 1923—1927; expelled from Party; shot after
1936 trial.

Smushkevich, Yakov Vladimirovich (1902—1941). Soviet Air Force
commander; executed after German invasion.

Sokolnikov, Grigory Yakovlevich (1888—1939). Soviet People’s Com-
missar of Finance, 1922—1926; envoy to Britain, 1929-1934; sen-
tenced to 10 years after 1937 show trial; died in prison.

Solovyev, Vladimir Sergeyevich (1853—1900). Religious philosopher;
sought synthesis of Russian Orthodox faith and Western scientific
thought and Roman Catholicism.

Stalin, Iosif Vissarionovich (1879-1953). Soviet political leader;
named General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1922. After
Lenin’s death in 1924, he gradually eliminated political rivals in
series of purges culminating in great trials of 1936-1938. His
original family name was Dzhugashvili; revolutionary party name
was Koba.

Stanislavsky, Konstantin Sergeyevich (1863—1938). Stage director; co-
founder of the Moscow Art Theater in 1898; known in the West

634 | GLOSSARY

for the “Stanislavsky method” of acting technique.

Stepun, Fyodor Augustovich (1884—1965). Philosopher; expelled in
1922.

Stolypin, Pyotr Arkadyevich (1862-1911). Tsarist statesman; served
as Minister of Interior after 1906; known for agrarian reform re-
settling poor peasants in Siberia; slain by an SR.

Sudrabs. See Latsis.

Sukhanov (Gimmer), Nikolai Nikolayevich (1882—1940). Menshevik
historian; meeting at his apartment in Petrograd in October, 1917,
the Bolsheviks decided to launch an armed uprising; figure in 1931
Menshevik trial; released after hunger strike; rearrested in purges
of late 1930’s; author of detailed account of the Bolshevik Revolu-
tion.

Surikov, ‘Vasily Ivanovich (1848—1916). Historical painter of the
realist school.

Suvorov, Aleksandr Vasilyevich (1729-1800). Military leader; led
Italian and Swiss campaigns against Napoleon.

Svechin, Aleksandr Andreyevich (1878—1935). Military historian;
shot.

Sverdlov, Yakov Mikhailovich (1885—1919). First Soviet President.

Tagantsev, Nikolai Stepanovich (1843—1923). Writer on criminal
law.

Tarle, Yevgeny Viktorovich (1875—1955). Soviet historian; was briefly
in Official disfavor in early 1930’s.

Tikhon, Patriarch (1865—1925). Head of Russian Orthodox Church
after 1917; detained 1922-1923 on oppositionist charges.

Timofeyev-Ressovsky, Nikolai Vladimirovich (1900—). Soviet radio-
biologist; worked in Germany, 1924—1945; spent 10 years in Stalin
camps after return to Soviet Union.

Tolstoi, Alexandra Lvovna (1884—). Youngest dauthter of Lev Tol-
ber of 1937 Supreme Soviet (national legislature).

Tolstoi, Alexandra Lvovna (1884—). Youngest daughter of Lev Tol-
stoi; author of a biography of her father; lives in the U.S., where
she founded the Tolstoi Foundation for aid to refugees.

Tomsky, Mikhail Pavlovich (1880—1936). First Soviet chief of trade
unions, until 1929; suicide in Stalin purges.

Trotsky (Bronshtein), Lev (Leon) Davidovich (1879—1940). Associate
of Lenin; first Soviet Defense Commissar, until 1925; expelled from
Party in 1927; deported to Turkey in 1929; slain in Mexico City
by a Soviet agent. |

Trubetskoi, Sergei Petrovich (1790-1860). One of the Decembrists;
death sentence commuted to exile; amnestied in 1856.

Glossary | 635

Tsvetayeva, Marina Ivanovna (1892-1941). Poet; lived abroad 1922
to 1939; a suicide two years after return to Soviet Union.

Tukhachevsky, Mikhail Nikolayevich (1893-1937). Soviet military
leader; shot in 1937 on trumped-up treason charges.

Tur Brothers. Pen names of two playwrights and authors of spy
stories: Leonid Davydovich Tubelsky (1905-1961) and Pyotr
Lvovich Ryzhei (1908-).

Tynyanov, Yuri Nikolayevich (1895—1943). Soviet writer and literary
scholar.

Ulrikh, Vasily Vasilyevich (1889-1951). Supreme Court justice; pre-
sided over major trials of 1920’s and 1930’s.

Ulyanov, Aleksandr Ilyich (1866-1887). Lenin’s older brother; exe-
cuted after unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Alexander III in
1887.

Ulyanova (Yelizarova-Ulyanova), Anna Ilyinichna (1874—1935).
Lenin’s sister; journalist and editor.

Uritsky, Moisei Solomonovich (1873-1918). Revolutionary; chairman
of the Petrograd Cheka; his assassination by an SR set off Red
Terror.

Utyosov, Leonid Osipovich (1895-—). Soviet orchestra leader and
variety-stage star.

Valentinov (Volsky), Nikolai Vladislavovich (1879—1964). Journalist
and philosopher; former Bolshevik turned Menshevik; emigrated
1930.

Vasilyev-Yuzhin, Mikhail Ivanovich (1876—1937). Revolutionary;
secret police and justice official. |

Vavilov, Nikolai Ivanovich (1887—1943). Prominent plant geneticist;
Director of Institute of Applied Botany (1924—1940) and Institute
of Genetics (1930—1940); arrested 1940; died in imprisonment.

Vereshchagin, Vasily Vasilyevich (1842—1904). Painter noted for
battle scenes.

Vladimir II Monomakh. Ruler of Kievan Russia, 1113—1125.
Vladimirov (Sheinfinkel), Miron Konstantinovich (1879—1925). Early
Soviet official in agriculture, finance and economic management.
Vlasov, Lieut. Gen. Andrei Andreyevich (1900-1946). Red Army
officer; captured by Germans in 1942; led Russian forces against

Soviet Union; handed over by Allies after war and executed.

Voikov, Pyotr Lazarevich (1888—1927). Bolshevik revolutionary;
Soviet representative in Warsaw, 1924—1927; assassinated by an
émigré.

Voloshin, Maksimilian Aleksandrovich (1878-1932). Symbolist poet
and watercolorist; opposed Bolsheviks.

636 | GLOSSARY

Voroshilov, Kliment Yefremovich (1881—1969). Close associate of
Stalin; long: Defense Commissar; Soviet President, 1953—1960.

Vysheslavtsev, Boris Petrovich (1877-1954). Philosopher; exiled in
1922. |

Vyshinsky, Andrei Yanuaryevich (1883—1954). Lawyer and diplomat;
former Menshevik turned Bolshevik; chief state prosecutor in show
trials, 1936-1938; Deputy Foreign Commissar and Minister, 1939-
1949 and 1953-1954; Foreign Minister, 1949-1953.

Wrangel, Pyotr Nikolayevich (1878-1928). Tsarist military com-
mander; led anti-Bolshevik forces in South in 1920 after Denikin.

Yagoda, Genrikh Grigoryevich (1891—1938). Secret police official;
People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs, 1934—1936; shot after
1938 show trial.

Yakubovich, Pyotr Filippovich (1860—1911). Poet; translated Baude-
laire; wrote memoirs about his Tsarist exile.

Yaroshenko, Nikolai Aleksandrovich (1846—1898). Painter.

Yenukidze, Avel Safronovich (1877—1937). Bolshevik official; Secre-
tary of Central Executive Committee, 1918—1935; shot in purges.

Yermilov, Vladimir Vladimirovich (1904—1965). Soviet literary critic.

Yesenin, Sergei Aleksandrovich (1895—1925). Imagist poet; suicide.

Yezhov, Nikolai Ivanovich (1895-1939). Secret police official;
People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs, 1936—1938.

Yudenich, Nikolai Nikolayevich (1862—1933). Tsarist military com-
mander; led anti-Bolshevik forces in Estonia, 1918—1920.

Zalygin, Sergei Pavlovich (1913—). Soviet writer.

Zamyatin, Yevgeny Ivanovich (1884—1937). Writer; returned 1917
from abroad, but opposed Bolsheviks; emigrated in 1932; his novel
We, published in London in 1924, influenced Huxley, Orwell.

Zasulich, Vera Ivanovna (1849—1919). Revolutionary; acquitted after
attempt to assassinate Mayor of St. Petersburg; emigrated 1880;
returned 1905; became Menshevik.

Zavalishin, Dmitri Irinarkhovich (1804—1892). One of the Decem-
brists; sentenced to 20 years’ Siberian exile; worked as journalist
after 1863.

Zhdanov, Andrei Aleksandrovich (1896—1948). Close associate of
Stalin; shaped cultural policy after World War II.

Zhebrak, Anton Romanovich (1901—1965). Soviet geneticist.

Zhelyabov, Andrei Ivanovich (1851—1881). Revolutionary; executed
after his assassination of Alexander II in 1881.

Zhukov, Marshal Georgi Konstantinovich (1896—). World War II
leader.

Zinoviev (Apfelbaum), Grigory Yevseyevich (1883—1936). Associate
of Lenin; expelled from Party in 1927; shot after 1936 show trial.

Glossary | 637

INSTITUTIONS AND TERMS

All-Russian Central Executive Committee. See VTsIK.

April Theses. A programmatic statement issued by Lenin in April,
1917, calling for end of war with Germany and transfer of power
to the Soviets.

Basmachi. Name given to anti-Bolshevik forces in Central Asia after
1917 Revolution.

Black Hundreds. Armed reactionary groups in Tsarist Russia; active
from about 1905 to 1917 in pogroms of Jews and political assas-
sinations of liberal personalities.

Butyrki. A major Moscow prison, named for a district of Moscow;
often known also as Butyrka.

Cadet. See Constitutional Democratic Party.

Chechen. Ethnic group of Northern Caucasus; exiled by Stalin in
1944 on charges of collaboration with German forces.

Cheka. Original name of the Soviet secret police, 1917—1922; suc-
ceeded by GPU.

Chinese Eastern Railroad. A Manchurian rail system built (1897—
1903) as part of original Trans-Siberian Railroad. Jointly operated
by Chinese and Soviet authorities until 1935 (when it was sold to
Japanese-dominated Manchukuo government) and again in 1945-
1950. Russian acronym: KVZhD.

Codes. The 1926 Criminal Code and the 1923 Code of Criminal Pro-
cedure were repealed in 1958 with the adoption of new Fundamen-
tal Principles of Criminal Legislation and Criminal Procedure; in
1960 these were embodied in a new Criminal Code and a new
Code of Criminal Procedure.

Collegium. Governing board of Soviet government departments and
other institutions.

Comintern. Acronym for Communist International, the world organi-
zation of Communist parties that existed from 1919 to 1943.

Committee of the Poor, also known by the Russian acronym Kombed.
A Bolshevik-dominated organization of poor peasants (1918).

Constituent Assembly. A multiparty legislative body with large anti-
Bolshevik majority, elected in November, 1917, after the Bolshevik
Revolution. It met in January, 1918, but was broken up when it
refused to adopt Bolshevik proposals.

Constitutional Democratic Party. Founded in 1905 under the Tsars,
advocating a constitutional monarchy; played a conservative role
after overthrow of Tsar; members were known as Cadets, from a
Russian acronym for the party.

638 | GLOSSARY

Council of People’s Commissars. Name given the Soviet cabinet (gov-
ernment) before 1946, when it became the Council of Ministers;
also known by Russian acronym Sovnarkom.

Crimean Tatars. Exiled by Stalin to Central Asia in 1944 on charges
of collaboration with Germans.

Dashnak. Anti-Bolshevik group in Armenia after 1917 Revolution.

Decembrists. Group of Russian officers who took part in unsuccessful
liberal uprising against Nicholas I in December, 1825.

Doctors’ case. The arrest of leading Kremlin physicians, most of
them Jews, in 1952 on trumped-up charges of plotting against the
lives of Soviet leaders. At least one, Y. G. Etinger, is believed to
have died under interrogation; the others were released after Stalin’s
death in 1953.

Famine Relief, State Commission for. A Soviet governmental body,
set up in 1921-1922; also known by the Russian acronym Pom-
gol.

GPU. Designation for Soviet secret police in 1922; acronym for
Russian words meaning State Political Administration; continued
to be used popularly after 1922, when the official designation be-
came OGPU, acronym for United State Political Administration.

Gulag. The Soviet penal system under Stalin; a Russian acronym for
Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps.

Hehalutz. Zionist movement that prepared young Jews for settling in
Holy Land; it founded most of the kibbutzim.

Hiwi. German designation for Russian volunteers in German armed
forces during World War II; acronym for Hilfswillige.

Industrial Academy. A Moscow school that served as training ground
of industrial managers in late 1920’s and early 1930’s.

Industrial Party. See Promparty.

Informburo. See Sovinformburo.

Ingush. Ethnic group of Northern Caucasus; exiled by Stalin in 1944
on charges of collaboration with Germans.

Isolator. (1) Type of political prison established in early stage of
Soviet regime for fractious Bolsheviks and other political foes.
(2) In a labor camp, the designation for a building with punishment
cells.

Kalmyks. Ethnic group of Northern Caucasus; exiled by Stalin in
1943 on charges of collaboration with German forces.

KGB. Acronym for Soviet secret police after 1953; stands for State
Security Committee.

Khalkhin-Gol. River on border between China and Mongolia. Scene
of Soviet-Japanese military clashes in 1939.

Glossary | 639

Khasan. Lake on Soviet-Chinese border, near Sea of Japan. Scene of
Soviet-Japanese military clash in 1938.

Kolyma. Region of northeast Siberia; center of labor camps under
Stalin.

Komsomol. Russian acronym for Young Communist League.

KVZhD. See Chinese Eastern Railroad.

Labor day. Accounting unit on collective farms.

Lubyanka. Popular designation for secret police headquarters and
prison in central Moscow, named for adjacent street and square
(now Dzerzhinsky Street and Square); housed Rossiya Insurance
Company before the 1917 Revolution.

Makhorka. A coarse tobacco (Nicotiana rustica) grown mainly in the
Ukraine.

Mensheviks. Democratic faction of Marxist socialists; split in 1903
from Bolshevik majority; repressed after 1917 Bolshevik
Revolution.

MGB. Initials for Soviet secret police, 1946—1953; acronym for Min-
istry of State Security; succeeded by KGB.

MVD. Russian acronym for Ministry of Interior; performed secret
police function briefly in 1953.

Narodnaya Volya (literal translation: People’s Will). Secret terrorist
society dedicated to overthrowing Tsarism; existed from 1879 until
disbanded in 1881 after assassination of Alexander II.

Narodnik (Populist). Member of populist revolutionary movement
under the Tsars.

NEP. Acronym for New Economic Policy, a period of limited private
enterprise, 1921-1928.

Nine grams. A bullet.

NKGB. Designation of Soviet secret police, 1943—1946; acronym for
People’s Commissariat of State Security.

NKVD. Designation of Soviet secret police, 1934—1943; acronym for
People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs.

OGPU. Designation of Soviet secret police, 1922—1934; acronym for
United State Political Administration.

Okhrana. Name of Tsarist secret police from 1881 to 1917; Russian
word means “protection,” replacing the full designation Department
for the Protection of Public Security and Order.

OSO. See Special Board.

People’s Commissariat. Name of Soviet government departments from
1917 to 1946, when they were renamed “Ministry.”

Petrograd. Official name of Leningrad, 1914—1924.

640 | GLOSSARY

Polizei. German word for “police”; designation of Russians who
served as police under German occupation in World War II.

Pomgol. See Famine Relief.

Popular Socialist Party. Founded in 1906, it favored general demo-
cratic reforms, opposed terrorism.

Promparty. Mixed Russian-English acronym for Industrial Party (in
Russian, Promyshlennaya Partiya). Nonexistent underground to
which the organization of industrial managers tried in 1930 al-
legedly belonged.

Provisional Government. Coalition government of Russia after over-
throw of Tsarism, March to November, 1917; first under Prince
Georgi Lvov, later under Kerensky; overthrown by Bolsheviks.

Revolutionary Tribunal (Revtribunal). Special Soviet courts (1917-—
1922), which tried counterrevolutionary cases.

Russkaya Pravda. Political program of the Decembrists; drafted by
Pestel; the Russian words mean “Russian truth.”

Sapropelite Committee. A scientific study group that sought to use
bituminous lake-bottom ooze, or sapropel, as a fuel around 1920.

Schlusselburg. Fortress on Lake Ladoga, at outlet of Neva River; used
as political prison under Tsars; now called Petrokrepost.

Schutzbund. Armed contingents of Austrian Social Democrats; mem-
bers sought refuge in Soviet Union in 1934 after defeat in civil war.

Sharashka. Russian prison slang for a special research center in which
the research scientists, specialists, and technicians are all prisoners
under prison discipline.

Short Course. Familiar title of the standard Stalinist version of the
history of the Soviet Communist Party; used as the official text from
1938 until after Stalin’s death in 1953.

SMERSH. Acronym for Soviet counterintelligence during World War
II; stands for “death to spies.”

Smolny. Former girls’ school; Communist Party headquarters in Len-
ingrad.

Socialist Revolutionary Party. Created in 1890's out of several populist
groups; split at first congress held in Finland in December, 1905,
into right wing, opposed to terrorism, and left wing, favoring
terrorism; SR’s played key role in Provisional Government; left
wing cooperated briefly with Bolsheviks after Revolution.

Solovetsky Islands (colloquially known as Solovki). Island group in
White Sea, with monasteries; used as place of exile for rebellious
priests in Middle Ages; early forced-labor camp (SLON) after 1917
Revolution.

Sovinformburo. Soviet information agency in World War II.

Glossary | 641

Sovnarkom. See Council of People’s Commissars.

Special Board (Russian acronym: OSO). Three-man boards of People’s
Commissariat of Internal Affairs, with powers to sentence “socially
dangerous” persons without trial; abolished in 1953.

SR. See Socialist Revolutionary Party.

Stolypin car. A railroad car used to transport prisoners, named for
P. A. Stolypin; also known in prison slang as vagonzak, for vagon
zaklyuchennykh (prisoner car).

Supreme Council of the Economy. Highest industrial management
agency in early years of Soviet regime; established in 1917; abol-
ished 1932, when it was divided into industrial ministries.

Supreme Soviet. The national legislature of the Soviet Union, with
counterparts in its constituent republics; meets usually twice a year
to approve decisions taken by the Soviet leadership. Its lawmaking
function is performed between sessions by the Presidium of the
Supreme Soviet; nominally the highest state body in the Soviet
Union.

Time of Troubles. A period of hardship and confusion during the
Polish and Swedish invasions of Russia in the early seventeenth
century.

Union Bureau. See Mensheviks.

UPK. Code of Criminal Procedure. See Codes.

Verkhtrib. Russian acronym for Supreme Tribunal (1918—1922),
which tried the most important cases in the early Soviet period.

Vikzhel. Railroad workers union, opposed Bolsheviks after 1917
Revolution; acronym stands for All-Russian Executive Committee
of Railroad Workers Union.

VSNKh. See Supreme Council of the Economy.

VTsIK. Acronym for All-Russian Central Executive Committee, the
highest state body of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Repub-
lic, the largest Soviet state, from 1917 to 1937, when it was suc-
ceeded by the Presidium of the Republic’s Supreme Soviet. The
national equivalent of VTsIK was TsIK, the Central Executive
Committee of the U.S.S.R. (1922—1938), which became the Pres-
idium of the national Supreme Soviet.

Workers Opposition. Bolshevik faction that sought greater trade-union
control of industry and greater democracy within Party; its activities
were condemned at Tenth Party Congress in 1921, and some lead-
ers were later expelled from Party and arrested.

Zek. Prison slang for prisoner, derived from zaklyuchenny, Russian
word for “prisoner.”

Zemstvo. Local government unit in prerevolutionary Russia.

Index

Page numbers in boldface refer to the Glossary.

Abakumov, Viktor S., 112n, 126,
145, 154, 157, 158-159, 297,
298, 520-21, 553, 554n, 621

Abrikosova, A. I., 37

Adamova (Adamova-Sliozberg) see
Sliozberg

Against Capital Punishment, 301

Agranov, Yakov S., 95n, 621

agriculture, 32, 33, 55-59 passim, 64,
67, 80, 420

subversion of, in Criminal Code,
64-65, 67

see also collectives; famine; Kady
case; kulaks;. peasants

Aikhenvald, Yuli I., 372, 621

Akhmatova (Gorenko), Anna A.,
95n, 621

Alalykin, 445

Aldanov (Landau), Mark A., 220,
621

Aldan-Semyonov, Andrei I. 540n,
621

Aleksandrov, A. I., 126, 621

Aleksandrov, Vasily, 250n

Aleksei Mikhailovich, Tsar, 93, 242,
432

Alexander I, Tsar, 433

Alexander II, Tsar, 144-45

assassination attempts on, 132,
144, 287
Alexander III, Tsar, 134
Alliluyev family, 100, 621

642

All-Russian Central Executive
Committee (VTsIK), 307, 313,
321, 344, 352, 354, 365, 366—67,
436, 437, 438, 641

All-Russian Executive Committee of
Railroad Workers Union
(Vikzhel), 28, 641

“All-Union Bureau of the
Mensheviks”: trial, 49, 399-407

Altai region, legend about, 270

Altshuller, 442

Amfiteatrov, Aleksandr V., 220, 621

amnesty: (1905), 190-91

(1912), 272

(1919), 358-59, 360

(1920s), 39

(1927), 271

(1937; expected but not received),
68

during World War II, 81
(1945), 78, 190n, 191n, 251, 273n,
278n; rumors of, for political
prisoners, 271, 272, 273, 274,
280, 608
Anarchists, 30, 36, 41, 191, 409, 460,
463, 474
Anders, Wladyslaw, 77, 621
Andersen, Erik Arvid, 521-22, 551-54
Andreyashin, 163
Andreyev, Leonid N., 44, 621
Andreyushkin, Pakhomi I., 134n, 621
Anichkov, Vasily I., 443

Anichkova, Yelizaveta Y., 443
Anti-Soviet Agitation (ASA: also
KRA/Counter-Revolutionary
Activity), 60, 75, 80-81, 83, 284
Antonov-Saratovsky, Vladimir P.,
373n, 376, 399, 621-22
Ardamatsky, 367n, 370n
Arkadyev, Konstantin S., 452-53
army see military forces
arrests, 3-16
in foreign countries, 9, 263-64, 266
quotas for, 11, 71, 272
searches, 5—6, 7
see also denunciation; informers;
interrogations
arrests, mass, 11—12, 14, 24—28, 37-60
(1918-22), 28-37, 39, 300, 302-03,
306-67 passim, 371-72, 434-35
(1929-35), 24, 25, 47-59, 437
(1936-38), 24, 25, 60, 68-76, 130,
247, 252n, 408-19, 438, 535-36,
579
(1939-41), 76-80
(1942-46), 24-25, 60, 61, 63,
77-86, 110, 142, 164, 221m,
237-51 passim, 255-56, 259-66
passim, 270-71, 441, 507, 566,
579, 602
(1947-48), 25, 86, 89-90
(1948-50), 60, 90-92, 250, 264,
566
see also nationalities and ethnic
groups; religious persecution;
individual groups
ASA see Anti-Soviet Agitation
Aschenbrenner, Jupp, 112”
Austria: World War II, Soviet émigrés,
85, 566
Austrians (in U.S.S.R.;
Schutzbiindlers), 58, 608, 640
Averbakh, I. L., xii, 622

Babayev, 291n

Babich, Aleksandr, 146, 445

Babushkin, Ivan V., 6n, 622

Bakhtin, Mikhail M., 51, 622

Bakunin, Mikhail A., 132, 623

Baladin, 154

Bandera, Stepan (and “Banderovtsy”),
86, 91, 519, 622

Basmachi, 38, 637

Bazhenov, Boris, 370n

Bedny, Demyan, 488, 622

Bek, 346, 347, 348, 349

Belinsky, Vissarion G., 197, 622

Belov, Viktor A. (“Emperor
Mikhail”), 228-34, 607—08

INDEX | 643

Belyayev, 557

Benes, Eduard, 260n

Benois, Aleksandr N., 262, 622

Berbenyev, 163

Berdyayev, Nikolai A., 37, 130, 262,
372, 622

Berg, 364-65

Beria, Lavrenti P., 76, 145, 157, 158,
159, 189, 291, 622

Beridze, 311

Berlin: blockade, 260n, 553

World War II, 235

Bernshtein, Ans, 10, 545, 588-89

Biche, 425

Biron (Biren; Count Ernst Johann
Biihren), 93-94, 622

Black Hundreds, 312, 339, 637

Black Marias see prisoner transport,
Black Marias

Blaginin, 115-16

blatnye/blatari see thieves

Blednov, Zhora, 9

Blok, Aleksandr A., 188, 622

Bliicher, Vasily K., 230, 622

Blyumkin, Yakov G., 370n, 622

Bobrishchev-Pushkin, 350

Bogdan, Fyodor, 281

Boiko, 43

Boky, Gleb I., 281, 622

Bolsheviks, 34, 49n, 129, 130, 355,
359, 361, 402, 409, 410n, 434,
641

Bonch-Bruyevich, Vladimir D., 323,
622

Bondar, 116n

Bondarenko, Pavel, 244

Bondarin, Sergei A., 210, 622

Borodko, 138-39

Borshch, 265-66

Borushko, Pavel, Ivan, and Stepan,
74

Brest-Litovsk, peace treaty of, 343,
356

Bubnov, 604

Buchenwald, 238

Budenny, Semyon M., 51, 622

Bugayenko, Natalya I., 59

Bukharin, Nikolai I., 101m, 132n, 190,
299, 358, 405, 410-19 passim,
430, 622-23

Bulgakov, Sergei N., 262, 372, 623

Bulgakov, Valentin F., 372

Bulgaria: Greek rebels turned over
to U.S.S.R., 92

World War II, Soviet émigrés, 85
Bunin, Ivan A., 220, 263, 623
Bunyachenko, Sergei K., 258n, 623

644 |

Burkovsky, Boris, 8

Burnatsev, Mikhail, 244

Buryat-Mongols, 51

Butyrki (prison; Moscow), 26, 31,
125, 275, 277, 468, 489, 500,
605-07, 637

Solzhenitsyn in, 237, 239, 241-42,

248, 252n, 260, 265, 267-68, 269,
271-80, 395, 594-615

INDEX

Cadets see Constitutional Democratic
Party
camps, 551, 559, 563-64, 576-77,
583, 589-90
ITL (Corrective Labor Camp),
248
number of prisoners, estimate, 595
OLP (Otdelny Lagerny Punkt;
Separate Camp Site), 577n
Oper (Security officers), 551, 574,
618

PFL (Identification and Screening
Camp), 248-49
Special Camps, 554-55, 566
VOKhR (Militarized Guard
Service), 157, 249
see also transit prisons and camps;
Tsarist regime, prisons and camps
cannibalism (during famine), 183,
342, 343
Catherine II (Catherine the Great),
Empress, 94, 247, 254n, 281, 433,
500
cells see prisons, cells
Chaliapin, Fyodor I., 262
Charnovsky, N. F., 377, 381-82, 387,
389-90, 391, 623
Chavchavadze, Olga, 68
Chavdarov, 283, 294
Chayanov, Aleksandr V., 50
Chebotaryev, S. A., 108-09, 114, 115,
469
Chechens, 25, 84, 637
Cheka (VChK; Extraordinary Com-
mission for Struggle Against
Counterrevolution, Sabotage, and
Speculation), 28, 30, 34, 36, 72,
300, 336, 617, 637
extrajudicial reprisal, 28, 300, 302,
307, 322, 326, 367, 435, 436 |
see also Kosyrev, F. M., trial;
Revolutionary Tribunals
Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 46, 112,
121, 451, 581 :
Chekhovsky, Vladimir M., 51, 623
Chernov, Viktor M., 361, 623
Chetverukhin, 5

children and adolescents, 37—38, 87
arrests, 55, 58, 89, 90, 91, 410,
547
see also family and relatives (of
prisoner); Komsomol; schools
and universities
China, 251-52, 264
China (People’s Republic), 260n,
266n, 383
Chinese (in U.S.S.R.): arrests, 247
Chinese Eastern Railroad (KVZhD),
72, 156, 217, 637
Chinguli, 454-55
ChS see family and relatives (of
prisoner)
Chubar, Vlas Y., 412, 623
Chulpenyev, Pavel, 110, 115, 292-93
Churchill, Sir Winston, 259—60, 553
church trials see Orthodox Church,
arrests and trials
civil war (Greece), 91, 92
Civil War (Spain), 86, 263
Civil War (U.S.S.R.), 29, 32-33, 39,
262, 265, 269, 300, 302-03, 326,
334, 355, 356, 360, 361, 402,
434-36, 456; see also arrests, mass
(1918-22); Socialist Revolu-
tionary Party
Code see Code of Criminal Procedure;
Criminal Code
Code of Criminal Procedure (UPK),
122, 139, 140, 637
Article 93, 97n
Article 111, 123
Article 136, 65, 122
Article 139, 123
Form 206, signing of, 70, 141,
142-43
collectives, 10, 56, 57, 58, 59, 67, 75,
87-88, 639
Comintern, 72, 247, 345, 637
Committees of the Poor, 29, 55, 303,
637
Communist Party: arrests of members,
8, 68, 69, 70, 73, 78, 395, 408-19,
472, 476, 477
Constituent Assembly, 26, 30, 314,
343, 344, 356, 359, 361, 364, 474,
637
Constitutional Democratic Party
(Cadets), 26, 357, 358, 475, 637
arrests, 26, 30, 31
cooperatives, 28
Central Union of Consumer
Cooperatives, 401
see also Kady case, trial; Working
Peasants Party

Cossacks, 39, 262
World War II, 259-60; with
Wehrmacht units, 85, 246, 254n,
259, 262n, 263, 627
Council of People’s Commissars, 356,
638
Council of Public Figures, 401
Counter-Revolutionaries see KR/KR’s
courts see laws and judiciary
Crimean Tatars, 25, 84, 253n, 638
Crimean War, 272
Criminal Code (UK), 32, 60, 122,
282-83, 290, 342, 354, 355,
363-64, 372, 436, 637
Article 6, 60-61
Article 7, Section 35, 86, 290
Article 19, 61-62, 65, 80
Article 51, 297
Article 58, 60-68, 95, 354, 372, 436,
475, 504, 560; Section 1, 60-61,
77, 79, 80, 81, 243, 266; Section
2, 62, 266; Section 3, 62; Section
4, 62-63, 266; Section 5, 63;
Section 6, 63-64, 86, 221n, 247;
Section 7, 64—65; Section 8, 65;
Section 9, 65; Section 10, 38, 60,
65-66, 80-81, 251; Section 11,
66-67, 505; Section 12, 67;
Section 13, 67, 266; Section 14,
67
Article 59, Section 3, 438
Article 69, 352
Article 71, 371
Article 82, 505
Article 92, 106
Article 95, 106
Article 109, 560
Article 162, 505
Lenin’s work on, 352-53, 354, 371
lettered articles, 64, 284
see also sentences
Czechoslovakia: World War II: Soviet
émigrés, 85, 264, 566; Vlasov
men aided rebels, 235, 258—59
Czechs (in U.S.S.R.): arrests, 77, 81

D., Alexander (Alexander M. Dolgun),
9, 126-27, 181n, 182n, 596, 623

Dal (Dahl), Vladimir I., 97, 287, 623

Dallin, David J., 595n

Dan (Gurvich), Fyodor I., 402, 623

Danilov, 127

Dashnaks, 38, 638

Daskal, Nikolai S., 294

Decembrists, 131-32, 238, 272, 433,
638

Russkaya Pravda, 132, 640

INDEX | 645
decrees see laws and judiciary, decrees
Deich, 174
“Democratic Party,” 611
Denikin, Anton I., 263, 326, 330, 359,
402, 436, 623
denunciations, 12, 40, 53, 78, 97, 477
and Criminal Code, 67, 89, 91
informers, 40, 46, 59, 97
Derevyanko, 537
Derzhavin, Gavriil R., 295, 623
Deterding, Sir Henry, 47
Deul, 604
Diaghilev, Sergei P., 262
Dimitrov, Georgi M., 277n, 408,
623
disenfranchisement (“muzzle”), 245,
248, 291
Divnich, Yevgeny I., 145n, 602
Dmitriyev, 557
‘Dmitriyev, Dmitri M., 404
Dobryak, I., 286
“doctors’ case,” 92, 157, 158, 638
Donets Basin, development of, 374,
378
Donskoi, D. D., 362, 623
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor M., 214, 262-63
Crime and Punishment, 120-21
Diary of a Writer, 287-88
Doyarenko, Aleksei G., 50, 623
Doyarenko, Yevgeniya, 13-14, 34,
96

Dyakov, Boris A., 540n, 623
Dzerzhinsky, Feliks E., 97, 130, 314,
318, 320, 321, 324, 336, 370n,
371, 372, 623
arrest, 409-10, 467, 471
Dzhunkovsky, V. F., 67n

economy and economic planning,
44-46
Five-Year Plans, 58, 381, 390, 397
“gold” wave, 52-54, 98
“Mikoyan prosperity,” 423
New Economic Policy (NEP), 30,
41, 52, 337, 340, 391, 392, 639
State Planning Commission
(Gosplan), 44, 63, 272, 392, 401
subversion of, and Criminal Code,
64-65
Supreme Council of the Economy
aes 43-44, 63, 392, 401,
see also engineers and technicians;
Promparty, trial; trade unions
Edzhubova, Magdalena, 46
Ehrenburg, Ilya G., 137, 370n, 624
-Eichmans, 463, 464

646 | INDEX
Elizabeth (Yelizaveta Petrovna),
Empress, 432-33, 440
émigrés, 192, 262-63, 268-69, 360,
371-72
arrests: in foreign countries, by
Soviet agents, 9, 263-64, 266;
World War II and after, 63,
84-85, 238, 262-66 passim, 566,
602
and Criminal Code, 63
Foreign Delegation of the Menshe-
viks, 405, 406
Promparty, trial, 384, 385, 394
Spanish Civil War, 263
World War II: with Resistance,
263; with Wehrmacht units, 254n,
257n; see also arrests above
engineers and technicians, 43-44, 197,
390, 391, 392
arrests and trials, 31, 44—49 passim,
73, 197-98, 227, 372
see also Glavtop (Main Fuels
Committee), trial; intelligentsia;
Promparty, trial; Shakhty case,
trial
Epstein, Julius, 85n
Esperantists, persecution of, 59
espionage, 608-09
and Criminal Code, 63-64, 247
mass arrests, 72, 90, 247, 371-72
PSh (Suspicion of Espionage), 64,
284
SVPSh (Contacts Leading to Sus-
picion of Espionage), 64, 284
World War II, German recruitment
of Soviet prisoners of war, 220,
221-22, 246-47, 247-48, 260,
261
Estonia/Estonians, 213—14, 384
arrests and trials, 25, 62, 77, 78, 91,
289-90
World War II, with Wehrmacht
units, 253n, 262n
ethnic groups see nationalities and
ethnic groups
Etinger, Y. G., 157-58, 624

Faitelevich, 441
family and relatives (of: prisoner
[ChS]), 6, 12, 58,.106, 226, 284,
460, 480, 549-50, 567-68
arrests, 8, 39, 40, 72, 73, 77, 91
correspondence, 6, 460, 480, 481,
514-15, 549-50
exile, 33, 85, 264
food parcels, 6, 114, 195-96, 214,
280, 452, 469, 479, 546, 606

famine (1920s), 334, 342, 343, 344
and Orthodox Church, 343-47
passim, 351
State Commission for Famine Relief
(Pomgol), 34, 344, 345, 346,
347, 351, 638
famine (1930s), 55, 198
Famine Organizers, trial, 47—48
farming see agriculture
Fastenko, Anatoly I., 190-96, 201,
202, 205, 206, 216, 223, 226,
227, 229, 233
Fedotov, A. A., 375, 377, 380, 381,
382, 389, 391, 393, 394, 397, 624
Feldman, 441
Figner, Vera N., 457, 458, 624
Filonenko, Maksimilian M., 357, 624
Finnish War, 77, 243
Firguf, 325n
The First Circle, 157, 590
Five-Year Plans see economy and
economic planning, Five-Year
Plans
Florya, Father Fyodor, 576
“Four-sixths” law, 58, 88-89
France, Anatole, 267
France, 192, 272, 383-84
Soviet émigrés, 43, 263
World War II, Resistance, 257n,
263
Frank, Semyon L., 372, 624
Free Philosophic Society, 59
“Fundamental Principles of Criminal
Prosecution of the U.S.S.R.,” 291
Fyodor Ivanovich, 232, 624
Fyodorov, 153
Fyodorov, 329-30

Gaaz, Fyodor P. (Friedrich Joseph
Haas), 208n, 624
Gamarnik, Yan B., 411, 624
Gammerov, Boris, 235-36, 611-12,
613, 614
Gandal, Berta, 98
Garin, N. (Nikolai G. Mikhbailovsky),
46, 624
Gartman, 41
Gavrilov, 545
Gendelman-Grabovsky, Mikhail Y.,
359, 365
Geraska, 441, 453
Germans (in U.S.S.R.): arrests, 78
Germany, 36n, 59, 174
Gestapo compared to MGB, 145n .
Jews, persecution of, 55, 174
World War I, 219n, 242, 343, 356-
57 j

Germany (cont'd)

World War II, 80, 81-82, 263, 518;
German prisoners of war, 84, 584,
602; prisoner of war camps,
218-19, 239, 243, 245-46, 248,
256; Soviet émigrés, 85, 566;
Soviet prisoners of war as police
(Polizei), 142, 218, 245, 246,
640; Soviet prisoners of war as
spies, 220, 221-22, 246-47, 247-
48, 260, 261; Soviet prisoners
of war as work force, 238, 245,
246, 258; Soviet prisoners of war
with partisans, 244-45, 261; war
criminals, 84, 175, 176-77; see
also World War II, anti-Soviet
fighting forces with Wehrmacht

Gernet, Mikhail N., 301n, 466n, 624

Gil-Blazhevich (Rodionov), V. V.,
254n, 257n

Ginzburg, Abram M., 403-04

Ginzburg, Yevgeniya S.: Journey into
the Whirlwind, xii, 99n, 480, 481,
482, 567, 624

Gippius, Zinaida N., 263, 624

Glavtop (Main Fuels Committee):
trial, 97, 334-35, 388

Godelyuk, 316-17, 318

Goldman, 107, 170, 171

“gold” wave, 52-54, 98

Golikov, Filipp I., 240n, 624

Golitsyn, Vsevolod P., 445

Golyakov, Ivan T., 172, 624

Gorky, Maxim (Aleksei M. Peshkov),
xii, 194, 223, 241, 512n, 560, 624

and Korolenko, 34, 36n

and Lenin, 31—32, 328

Gorokhovets: army camps, 110, 163

Gosplan see State Planning Commis-
sion

Gots, Abram R., 361, 624

Gotye (Gautier), Yuri V., 51

Govorov, Leonid A., 252n, 624

GPU (State Political Administration),
36, 37, 68, 336, 638

Grabishchenko, Nikolai, 146, 154

Grachev, Misha, 580 —

Granat Encyclopedia, 204, 410n

Granovsky, Bishop Antonin, 345

Great Britain, 272, 287, 288, 384

World War II, 242; British prisoners
of war, 219, 243; repatriation of
Soviets, 85, 249, 259-60; Yalta
Conference, 185, 259

Greece: civil war, 91, 92
Greeks (in U.S.S.R.): arrests, 91-92
Griboyedov, Aleksandr S., 132, 624

INDEX | 647

Grigorenko, Pyotr G., 240n, 624

Grigoryev, Iosif F., 14, 625

Grin, 311, 313

Grin (Grinovsky), Aleksandr S., 533,
625

Grinevitsky, Ignati I., 132, 625

Groman, Vladimir G., 49, 401, 407,
625

Gromyko, Andrei A., 552-53, 625

Gubaidulin, 427n

Gugel, 313

Guiding Principles of the Criminal
Law of the R.S.F.S.R., 301

Gul (Goul), Roman F., 156, 625

Gumilyev, Nikolai S., 95, 515, 625

Gurovich, S. Y., 350, 351

Gvozdev, Kuzma A., 401n

Haas, Friedrich-Joseph see Gaaz,
Fyodor P.

Hammurabi, Code of, 65

Hauke, Maximilian, 36n

Haw Haw, Lord (William Joyce), 242

Herzen, Aleksandr I., 287, 625

Hitler, Adolf, 55, 59, 258, 399

“Hiwi,” 246, 638

Hungarians: arrests, 86

Hungary: uprising, 260n

Ignatovsky, 289, 441
Ikov, V. K., 400-01
Ilin, 149n
Ilin, Fyodor F. see Raskolnikov (Ilin)
Ilin, Ivan A., 372, 625
Ilin, Mikhail A. see Osorgin (Ilin)
Ilin, Viktor N., 149n, 155
Industrial Party see Promparty
informers, 40, 46, 59, 97; see also
denunciations
Ingal, Georgi, 613, 614
Ingush, 84, 638
Inoshin, 5
intelligentsia: arrests and persecution,
28, 31, 41—42, 72-73, 371-72,
399: “Tactical Center” case, trial,
327-33, 401
Lenin on, 32, 328
see also engineers and technicians;
literature; schools and universities;
scientists
International Red Cross, 219
interrogations, 65, 67, 93—143, 144,
504, 619
Form 206, 70, 141, 142-43
physical methods, 53, 54, 93, 98-99,
100, 102, 103, 108-17, 126-27,
127-28

648 |

interrogations (cont'd)
psychological methods, 97-98, 99,
103-08, 448
Tsarist regime, 132, 409
see also Code of Criminal Procedure;
prisons .
Ion, Father Superior, 325
Iosse, Konkordiya N., 40, 154
Irakly, Father, 14-15
Irkutsk: prison, 534, 535, 542
Italy: World War II, Resistance, 257n
ITL (Corrective Labor Camp), 248
Ivan Kalita, 339, 625
Ivanov, 243
Ivanov, V. I., 505n
Ivanova, 361
Ivanovo: prisons, 445, 450-51, 452,
489, 534-35
Ivanov-Razumnik (Razumnik V.
Ivanov), 99n, 111, 125, 150n,
395, 625
Ivkov, 117
Izgoyev (Lande), Aleksandr S., 372,
625

INDEX

Izmailov, Nikolai V., 51, 625
Izvestiya, 36n, 133, 290n, 291n, 297n,
375n, 400, 413

Japan: World War II, 84, 259n

Japanese War, 272

Jews, persecution of: Germany, 55,
174

Soviet: Black Hundreds, 312, 339,

627; “doctors’ case,” 92, 157,
158, 638; Hehalutz, 38, 638

judiciary see laws and judiciary

Kadenko group, 83

Kady case: trial, 419-31, 449, 450;
see also Vlasov, Vasily G.

Kagan, Viktor, 601

Kaganovich, Lazar M., 45, 414-15,
416, 417, 625

Kalganov, Aleksandr, 71

Kalina, Ira, 562

Kalinin, Mikhail I., 344, 345, 449,
455, 472n, 586, 625

Kalinnikov, Ivan A., 379, 389, 398

Kalmyks, 25, 84, 638

Kalyagin, 292 ©

Kamenev (Rosenfeld), Lev B., 130,
358, 397, 409-13 passim, 467,
625

Kaminsky (and “Kaminsky brigade”),
257n, 258n

Kanatchikov, 345

Kaplan, Fanya (Dora), 328, 362, 625

Karakozov, Dmitri V., 287, 625
Karasik, 425, 428
Karbe, Yuri, 539
Karetnikov, Aleksandr G., 294-95,
296
Karger, N. K., 6
Karklin, 354, 435
Karpov, Fyodor F., 248, 601
Karpunich-Braven, 10, 116, 126
Karsavin, Lev P., 372, 625
Kasso, Lev A., 310, 626
Kasyanov, Vasily A., 98
Katanyan, Ruben P., 465, 626
Katyn, 77
Kaverznev (Kolbe), 79n
Kazakov, Ignati N., 5n, 626
Kazan: prison, 480, 481, 482
Kerch: World War II, 81, 239, 241
Kerensky, Aleksandr F., 434, 626
KGB (State Security Committee), 638
Khalkhin-Gol, 80, 110, 638
Kharkov: Political Red Cross, 41
World War II, 81, 239
Khasan, 80, 639
Khodkevich, Tanya, 37
Kholik, 294
Khomenko, V. N., 453-54
Khrennikov, 375, 396, 409
Khrushchev, Nikita S., 159, 230-31
reforms, 158n, 296-97, 407-08,
555
and Solzhenitsyn, 234n
Khrushcheva, L. N., 332
Khrustalev-Nosar, Georgi S., 435, 626
Kineshma: prison, 450, 489
Kirov (Kostrikov), Sergei M., 58, 412,
437, 626
Kirov (form. Vyatka): prison, 462,
537
Kirpotenko, 393
Kishkin, Nikolai M., 34, 330, 626
Kiula, Konstantin, 603
Kizevetter (Kiesewetter), Aleksandr
A., 372, 626
Klegel, 8
Klempner, Volodya, 602
Klyuchevsky, Vasily O., 326, 626
Klyugin, 425, 426-27, 450
Klyuyev, Nikolai A., 98, 626
Knyazh-Pogost: camp, 539-40, 573,
584-85
Kocherovsky, 41
Koestler, Arthur, 409, 412
Kogan, Lazar, 42 ~
Kokhanskaya, 156
Kolchak, Aleksandr V., 123, 314, 326,
359, 360, 626

Koloskov, 469
Kolpakov, Yakov P., 452
Koltsov, Nikolai K., 331, 626
Kolupayev, 557
Komsomol (Young Communist
League), 42, 48, 612, 639
Kondratyev, Nikolai D., 50, 331, 626
Konopleva, 362
Kopeikin, 478
Korea, 260n
Koreans (in U.S.S.R.): arrests, 72,
247
Korneyev, I., 154, 479, 480-81, 507
Korneyeva, Vera A., 107-08, 170-72,
279, 494, 527
Kornilov, Lavr G., 402, 467, 626
Korolenko, Vladimir G., 31, 281, 434,
523, 626
letters to Gorky, 34, 36n
Letters to Lunacharsky, 343
Korzukhin, 153
Kosaryeva, Lena, 90
Kosior, Stanislav V., 412, 626
Kosyrev, F. M.: trial, 95, 314-22,
370n
Kotik, Liza, 476
Kotlas: prison, 538-39, 546, 557,
584
Kotlyarevsky, 330
Kotov, 140, 141
Kotovich group, 73
Koverchenko, Ivan, 517-21
Kovno Fortress, 96
Kovsharov, 352
Kozlov, 461
Kozyrev, Nikolai A., 480, 481, 482,
484, 627
KPZ (Cell for Preliminary Detention),
9, 124-25, 180
KR/KR’s (Counter-Revolutionaries),
41, 227, 468, 475-76, 500
KRD (Counter-Revolutionary
Activity), 139n, 284
KRM (Counter-Revolutionary
Thought), 284
KRTD (Counter-Revolutionary
Trotskyite Activity), 284
see also Anti-Soviet Agitation
Kramarenko, Georgi, 185, 196, 206,
208, 216-17, 232-33
Krasikov, Pyotr A., 350, 351, 458n,
627
Krasnaya Presnya (prison; Moscow),
489, 537n, 542, 545, 558-59, 560,
568, 607
Solzhenitsyn in, 537-38, 546-49,
551-54, 557-58, 563-64

INDEX | 649

Krasnitsky, 351

Krasnov, Pyotr N. (and Krasnov
Cossacks), 85, 246, 254n, 259,
262n, 263, 627

Krasnov (Levitin), Anatoly E., 346n,
627

Kravtsov, Vasya, 580

Krestinsky, Nikolai N., 408, 627

Kresty (prison; Leningrad), 26, 83,
179, 183n, 437, 443-44, 448

Kretov, 603

Kronstadt Fortress, 30, 33—34

Kruglov, Sergei N., 589, 627

Krutikova, Mariya, 476

Kruzhkov, Nikolai F., 153, 155, 447

Krylenko, Nikolai V., xii, 306, 309,
311, 349, 434-35, 627

arrest, 318, 324, 375n, 395, 412
prosecutions by, 306-10; “All-Union

Bureau of the Mensheviks” case,
49, 399-407; “churchmen” case,
322-27; Glavtop (Main Fuels
Committee case), 97, 334-35;
Kosyrev case, 95, 314-22, 370n;
Malinovsky case, 319, 628;
Moscow Revtribunal case,
311-13; Oldenborger case,
336-41, 372-73, 391; Promparty
case, 1, 47, 48, 49-50, 299, 336,
376-99, 400, 406; Russkiye
Vedomosti case, 310-11; Shakhty
case, 47, 336, 373-75, 376;
Shchastny case, 306-07, 434, 435,
632; Socialist Revolutionary
Party case, 306-07, 342, 351-52,
354—67; “Tactical Center” case,
327-33, 401

Krylov, N. I., 421, 422

Kuibyshev, Valerian V., 339, 627

Kuibyshev: prison, 550, 569, 570

kulaks, 54—57, 79, 99, 303, 343, 578

Kupriyanov, 393

Kupriyanov, G. N., 116n, 627

Kursky, Dmitri I., 352-53, 627

Kushnaryev, 146

Kuskova, Yekaterina D., 34, 627

Kuznetsk Basin, development of, 51,
378

Kuznetsov, 159n

Kuznetsov, 322, 324

Kuznetsov, Vasily I., 252n, 627

KVZhD see Chinese Eastern Railroad

Ladyzhensky, Aleksandr I., 12
Ladyzhensky, Nikolai I., 45-46
Lamsdorf, 257n

Lapshin, Ivan I., 372, 627

650 |

Larichev, Viktor A., 379-80, 387,
388, 394, 398, 399
Larin, Y., 13n
Larin, Y. (Mikhail A. Lurye), 146,
627
Latsis (Lacis), Martyn I. (Yan F.
Sudrabs), 627
on Cheka, xii, 31, 96-97, 101, 300,
301, 303, 314, 425
Latvia/Latvians, 189, 384
arrests, 25, 62, 72, 77, 78, 91, 247
laws and judiciary, 299-431
acquittal, lack of grounds for, 291
constitution, 412, 415
decrees, 30, 32, 33, 55-56, 78, 86-
87, 87-88, 89n, 91, 289n, 290-91,
336, 344, 439
“Four-sixths” law, 58, 88-89
“Fundamental Principles
of Criminal Prosecution of the
US.S.R.,” 291
Guiding Principles of the Criminal
Law of the R.S.F.S.R., 301
judiciary, 286-98; circuit. courts,
301, 302; closed courts, 286-87,
288; military tribunals, 81,286,
293-98, 301, 436; people’s-¢ourts,
301, 302; public trials, 47-48,
299, 306—431; Revolutionary
‘Tribunals (Revtribunals), 32,
282, 301-05, 308, 640; Special
Boards (OSO), 143, 275, 281,
283-86, 288, 289, 290, 295, 641;
Supreme Tribunal (Verkhtrib),
286, 295-98, 327, 366, 641;
Troikas, 281-83
Khrushchev reforms, 158n, 296-97,
407-08, 555
“Seven-eighths” law, 58, 88, 436-37
Tsarist regime, 281, 287, 301, 432-
34
see also Code of Criminal Pro-
cedure; Criminal Code; sentences;
individual trials
Lebedev, 241—42
Lebedev, 292
Lefortovo (prison; Moscow), 113,
180-81
Leist, 312
Lelyushenko, Dmitri D., 252n, 627
Lenin, Vladimir I., 6n, 27, 30, 33, 192,
193, 297n, 306, 310, 321, 337,
434, 541
April Theses, 445,°637
assassination attempt, by Kaplan,
328, 362, 625

INDEX

Lenin, Vladimir I. (cont'd)
correspondence, 31-32, 328, 352-53,
371
Criminal Code, work on, 352-53,
354, 371
and Gorky, 31-32, 328
“How to Organize the Competi-
tion,” 27
illness, 354, 372
on the intelligentsia, 32, 328
in Siberia, 350, 491, 579n
“What Are Our Ministers Thinking
Of?,” 132-33
Leningrad (Petrograd), 6, 30
Institute of the North, 73
mass arrests, 13n, 25, 50-51, 58, 69,
70, 72, 73, 77, 80, 441
Orthodox Church, 36, 345—46; trial,
36, 350-52
Political Red Cross, 41
Polytechnic Institute, 48
World War II, 80, 81, 179, 183,
252n—253n, 441-42, 511
see also Kresty (prison); Kronstadt
Fortress; Peter and Paul Fortress;
Schliisselburg Fortress
Lenka, 314
Lermontov, Mikhail Y., 161, 173,
627
Levina, Revekka S., 100, 627
Levitan, Yuri B., 75n, 627-28
Levitin see Krasnov (Levitin)
Levitskaya, Nadya, 10
Levitsky, Vanya, 12
Liberov, 362
Libert, 314, 316, 318
Libin, 142
Likhachev, Nikolai P., 51, 628
Lipov, 289
literature, 31, 66, 262—63, 372; see
also intelligentsia
Lithuanians: arrests, 25, 62, 72, 78,
91, 99-100
World War II, with Wehrmacht
units, 253n, 262n
“Living Church” see Orthodox
Church, “Living Church”
Lomonosov, Mikhail V., 197, 628
Longinov, 346
Lordkipanidze, G. S., 111, 628
Loris-Melikov, Mikhail T., 310, 628
Lorkh, Aleksandr G., 57, 628
Loshchilin, 571, 577
Lossky, Nikolai O., 262, 372, 628
Lozovsky, 292-93
Lozovsky, A. (Solomon A. Dridzo),
230, 628

Lubyanka (prison; Moscow), 96, 98,
114, 125, 187-88, 214—16, 322,
461, 639

Solzhenitsyn in, 134-42, 144,
184-235

Ludendorff, Erich, 357

Lunacharsky, Anatoly V., 192, 261,
343, 628

Lunin, 346

Lunin, 529-30

Lunin, Mikhail S., 132, 628

Lurye, Mikhail A. see Larin, Y.

Lysenko, Trofim D., 57, 599, 628

Lyubavsky, Matvei Kuzmich, 51

Main Fuels Committee see Glavtop

Maisky, Ivan M., 34, 628

Makarenko, Anton S., 506, 628

Makarov, 50

Makarov, 452

Makarov-Zemlyansky, 337

Makhotkin, 596-97

Makhrovskaya, 97

Makotinsky, 472n

Malinovsky, Roman V.: trial, 319,
628

Maltsev, Viktor I., 258n

Manchuria, 260n

World War II, Soviet émigrés, 85,

602

Mandelstam, Osip E., 370n, 628

Mariupolsky, 314

Mariya, Mother see Skobtsova,
Yelizaveta Y.

Mariyushkin, 265—66

Markos, Vafiades, 92, 628

Martov (Tsederbaum), Yuli O., 402,
628

Marx, Karl, 242, 313, 414

Masaryk, Jan, 260n

Matveyeva, G. P., 74

Maximych, 314

Mayakovsky, Vladimir V., 41, 42, 66,
525, 628

Meck, Nikolai K. von, 44—45, 200,
375, 629

Medvedev, 607-08

Melgunov, Sergei P., 133, 219n, 372,
629

Melnikov, 440

Mendel, Gregor: disciples arrested, 90

Mendel, Irma, 8

Mensheviks, 355, 386, 402, 639

arrests and trials, 30, 38, 41, 49,

63, 475; “All-Union Bureau of
the Mensheviks,” trial, 49, 399-
407

INDEX | 651
Mensheviks (cont'd)
Foreign Delegation, 405, 406
Sotsialistichesky Vestnik, 39
Menshikov, Aleksandr D., 517, 629
Menzhinsky, Vyacheslav R., 34, 314,
629
Meretskov, Kirill A., 252n, 629
Merezhkov, 508, 509, 510, 511
Merezhkovsky, Dmitri S., 216, 263,
629
Meshcherskaya-Grevs, 316, 317, 318
Metlin, 163
MGB (Ministry of State Security), 639
“Mikhail, Emperor” see Belov, Viktor
A

Mikhailov, Nikolai A., 230, 629
Mikolajczyk, Stanislaw, 86, 260n, 629
Mikov, Nikolai M., 73
Mikoyan, Anastas I., 423, 629
military forces: arrests and purges,
8, 26, 31, 32, 39, 68, 77, 79, 80,
81, 110, 238, 252n, 303, 307
conscription made universal and
compulsory, 303
and Criminal Code, 61, 79, 245,
352, 436
surrender forbidden, 243
“Tsarist Reds,” 39
see also Civil War (U.S.S.R.);
Finnish War; Japanese War;
prisoners of war; World War I;
World War II
“Military Plot,” 31, 307
Milyukov, Pavel N., 47, 629
Minayev, 571
“minus,” 35, 271, 282
Minusinsk: prison, 541, 584
Mirbach, 370n
Mironenko, 146
Mirovich, Vasily Y., 433, 629
Mirov-Korona, 72
Molotov (Skryabin), Vyacheslav M.,
58, 176, 416, 417, 629
Morozov, Savva, 333
Moscow, 29, 30, 44, 433
Higher Technical School, 389
mass arrests, 42—43, 80
Orthodox Church, trial, 36, 346—49
Political Red Cross, 41
prisons see Butyrki; Krasnaya
Presnya; Lefortovo; Lubyanka;
Shpalernaya; Srentenka; Taganka
Moscow Revtribunal: trial, 311-13
Moslems: arrests and trial, 254n
World War II, with Wehrmacht
units, 85, 257n, 262n
see also Tatars

652 |

Mova, 40

Muksalmsky Monastery Prison see
Solovetsky Islands

Miiller, Wilhelm, 487

Munshin, 155

Muralevich, Vadim S., 330

Muravyev, 53

Murom: rebellion, 29, 302

Mussavatists, 38

MVD (Ministry of Interior), 604, 639

Myakotin, Venedikt A., 329-30, 372,
629

INDEX

Nabokov (Sirin), Vladimir, 220, 263,
629
Narodnaya Volya, 287, 433, 456, 639
Narodniks, 409, 639
Narokov (Marchenko), Nikolai V.,
444, 629
Nasedkin, Aleksei A., 404
“National Center” plot, 31
nationalities and ethnic groups:
arrests and persecution, 51-52,
54-57, 62, 77-79, 84, 91-92,
99-100, 565-66
see also individual peoples
“National Labor Party of Russia,”
254n
navy, 355, 356
Kronstadt rebellion, 30, 33-34
see also military forces
Nazarenko, 314
Nekrasov, Nikolai A., 60, 629
Nevsky, Nikolai A., 6
New Economic Policy (NEP), 30, 41,
52, 337, 340, 391, 392, 639
Nicholas I, Tsar, 131-32
Nicholas II, Tsar, 41n
Nicolaevsky, Boris I., 595n
Nikolsky, 304
Nikovsky, Andrei, 51
NKGB (People’s Commissariat of
State Security), 639
NKVD (People’s Commissariat of
Internal Affairs), 27, 30, 32, 639
nobility: arrests, 40, 58
Nogtyev, 463
Norway: World War II, 219
Novikov, 74
Novikov, Nikolai I., 281, 629
Novitsky, Y. P., 352
Novorussky, Mikhail V., 41, 457n,
482, 630
Novosibirsk: prison, 293, 534, 542

Obolensky, Yevgeny P., 132, 630
Ochkin, V. I., 388, 389, 394, 399

OGPU (United State Political
Administration), 639
Ohola, Richard, 127
Okhrana, 67, 195, 639
Okhrimenko, 446
Okorokov, Vasily (Robert Shtekker),
78n-79n
Oldenborger, V. V.: trial, 336-41,
372-73, 391
Olenyev, A. Y., 575, 578, 584-85
Olitskaya, Yekaterina L., 15, 461,
468-69, 472, 476, 630
Olitsky, Dima, 48
Olminsky (Aleksandrov), Mikhail S.,
500, 630
One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich, 170, 175n, 298, 540n
Ordzhonikidze, Grigory (Sergo), K.,
45n, 416, 630
Orel: prison, 466, 479, 567
Orthodox Church, 342, 345
arrests and trials, 28, 29, 36-38,
50-51, 59, 86, 227, 325-27, 342,
352; “churchmen” case, 322-27;
Moscow church trial, 36, 346-49;
Petrograd church trial, 36, 350-52
and famine, 343-47 passim, 351
“Living Church,” 36-37, 351
property requisitioned and con-
fiscated, 29, 323, 325, 326, 342,
344-51 passim
Osadchy, 372
OSO see Special Boards
Osorgin (Ilin), Mikhail A., 372, 630
Ostyaks, Yenisei, 6
Otsep, 377
Ovsyannikov, 169-70

Palchinskaya, Nina A., 6, 74

Palchinsky, Pyotr A., 6, 44, 74, 200,
374-75, 395, 409, 630

Palen (Pahlen), Pyotr A., 37

Pannwitz, Helmuth von, 263

paradise islands see prisoners,
special-assignment work

passports, internal, 11, 39, 54, 82

Pasternak, Boris L., 614, 630

Paul I, Tsar, 433

Paulus, Friedrich von, 210

Pavel, 580

Pavel, Andrei, 11, 12

Pavlova, Anna P., 262

PD (Criminal Activity), 284

peasants, 30, 33, 55-56, 57-58,
302-03, 360

Committees of the Poor, 29, 55,

303, 637

peasants (cont'd)
intensivniki, 420
podkulachniks, 56-57
“Siberian Peasants’ Union,” trial,
33
see also agriculture; collectives;
famine; kulaks; Working Peasants
Party
Perel, 73
Peresvetov, R., 133
Perkhurov, Aleksandr P., 367, 630
Peshekhonov, Aleksei V., 372, 630
Peshkova-Vinaver, Yekaterina P., 41,
59, 227, 630
Pestel, Pavel I., 132, 630
Peter I (Peter the Great), 28, 54, 93,
432 |
Peter and Paul Fortress, 34, 275n,
479
Peters, Yakov K., 314, 318, 321, 630
Petrograd see Leningrad
Petunin, 401
PFL (Identification and Screening
Camp), 248-49
Pilnyak (Vogau), Boris A., 215, 630
Pintsov, Rudolf, 126
Platonov, Sergei F., 51, 630
Plekhanov, Georgi V., 39, 194, 630
Pletnev, Dmitri D., 60n, 630
Pobedonostsev, Konstantin P., 310,
631
Podbelsky, Yuri, 463n
Podgaisky, 312-13
podkulachniks, 56-57
Poincaré, Raymond, 47, 385
Pokhilko, 151n
Pokrovsky, Viktor P., 443
Poland, 41, 260n, 384
World War II, 254n, 257n; Polish
prisoners of war, 86, 219
Poles (in U.S.S.R.): arrests, 77, 81
Political Red Cross, 40—41, 227, 332,
468
polutsvetnye (“bitches” or “half-
breeds”), 559, 580-81, 619
Pomgol see State Commission for
Famine Relief
Ponomaryev, 609
Popkov, 164
Popov, Blagoi S., 247n
Popular Socialist Party, 30, 640
Postyshev, Pavel P., 412, 631
Potapov, Seryezha, 125n, 580
Prague: World War II, 235, 258-59
Pravda, 336, 367, 369, 374n, 463
prisoners: “beavers,” 507, 546
body searches, 481, 533, 569, 570

INDEX | 653

prisoners (cont'd)

case files, 514, 533, 559, 560, 561,
562

clothing, 515, 542, 569, 583, 598

communication, clandestine, 189,
205, 215, 280, 461, 481

correspondence, 6, 460, 480, 481,
514-15, 549-50 :

commissary, 114, 457, 460, 480

under death sentence, 444—55

exercise, 204, 211-13, 275n, 460,
466, 474, 478, 480, 601

food and drink, 53, 93, 98, 110,
111, 113, 114-15, 182, 204,
206—07, 224-25, 452, 457, 479,
494-96, 498, 509, 510, 511, 533,
536, 538, 540, 541, 556, 564,
571-72, 576, 577, 578, 581, 583,
584, 607

food parcels, 6, 114, 195-96, 214,
280, 452, 469, 479, 546, 606

general-assignment work, 514, 556,
564, 619

hunger strikes, 464-74

illness and disease, 34n, 114, 125,
207-08, 446, 453, 479, 482, 535,
536, 564, 579, 585

number of, estimate, 595

personal possessions, 460, 465, 481,
492, 502, 503, 506, 507, 508, 510,
511, 515, 529, 544, 546, 569, 570,
584

petitions, 208-09, 446, 483

reading matter, 214-16, 457, 458,
460, 465, 468, 474, 477, 482,
484, 601

registration cards, 589-90

rights, 140, 141, 207, 208-09, 460

sanitary facilities, 125, 183, 203-05,
210, 225, 274, 280, 496-98, 527,
533, 540-41, 542, 569, 578,
579, 597, 601

special-assignment work (paradise

islands; sharashka), 556, 563,
588, 590, 596, 598, 604, 640

stool pigeons, 128, 153, 185, 186,
448, 574, 618

“suckers,” 497-98, 505, 515, 571,
619

see also amnesty; arrests; camps;
family and relatives (of prisoner) ;
interrogations; prisoner transport;
prisons; sentences; thieves; transit
prisons and camps

prisoners, nonpolitical, 65, 86—89,

250-51, 499-500, 619

654 | INDEX
prisoners, nonpolitical (cont'd)
short-term sentences, 288n-—289n,
560
terms switched or sold, 560, 561
as trusties, 536, 543-45, 559-60,
570, 580-81, 619-20
World War II, release for military
service, 81
see also amnesty; thieves
prisoners of war, 242, 249-50
and Criminal Code, 61, 245
Finnish War, 77, 243
and Hague Convention, 219
surrender forbidden by military
statutes, 61, 77, 239, 243
World War I, 219n, 242
prisoners of war (World War II):
British, 219, 243
German, 84, 584, 602
in German camps, 218-19, 239, 243,
245-46, 248, 256
Japanese, 84
Norwegian, 219
Polish, 86, 219
Soviet, 218, 219; arrests after
return, 25, 81, 82—83, 142, 164,
221n, 237-51 passim, 255-56,
259-60, 260-61, 602; as fighting
force with Resistance and parti-
sans, 244-45, 261; as police
(Polizei), 142, 218, 245, 246,
640; repatriation by Allies, 82n,
249, 259-60; as spies for
Wehrmacht, 220, 221-22, 246-47,
247-48, 260, 261; as work force,
82n—83n, 238, 245, 246, 258; see
also World War II, anti-Soviet
fighting forces with Wehrmacht
Yugoslav, 219
prisoner transport, 489-532, 565-87
Black Marias, 42, 160, 489, 525,
527-32
boats and barges, 32, 435, 499, 535,
565, 577-82
carts, 491, 563, 583
convoy guards, 64, 490, 491, 494-98
passim, 506-15 passim, 523, 533,
567-75 passim, 579, 580,
584, 585, 586; on special convoy,
16, 588, 589, 590-91
food and drink, 494-96, 498, 509,
510, 511, 571-72, 576, 578, 579,
581, 584
on foot, 491, 525, 527-28, 565,
567, 576, 578, 583-86
loading and unloading of prisoners,
490, 524-27, 567-70

prisoner transport (cont'd)
police dogs, 568, 575, 576, 584, 585
railroad cars (vagonzak): red
cattle cars, 489, 559, 565-67,
568, 570-74, 584, 585; Stolypin
cars, 490-94, 501, 513, 521, 566,
641
sanitary facilities, 496-98, 527, 578,
579
thieves, 492, 498-99, 501-08
passim, 515-16, 529-30, 570-71,
572, 573, 575, 579-80
Tsarist regime, 495n, 499-500
women, 38, 491, 494, 498, 499, 521,
530, 584
prisons, 457-83
cells, 68, 444—45, 457, 478, 479-80,
480-81, 533, 534-35, 537-38,
597-98, 606; interrogation, 98,
99, 100, 113-14, 179-89, 606;
KPZ (Cell for Preliminary
Detention), 9, 124—25, 180;
punishment cells, 98, 99, 100,
113-14, 182, 481-82, 494, 638;
solitary confinement (“box,” pit),
109, 110, 113, 124, 163, 180, 468
churches and monasteries used as,
438, 450, 479, 605
DPZ (House of Preliminary
Detention), 180
internal prisons, 184n, 190
isolator, 460, 473, 474, 475, 479-84,
638
TON (Special Purpose Prison), 457,
478-84
see also interrogations; transit
prisons and camps; Tsarist regime,
prisons and camps
Prokopovich, Sergei N., 34, 631
Promparty (Industrial Party), 640
trial, 1, 47, 48, 49-50, 299, 336,
376-99, 400, 406
Provisional Government, 355, 359,
402, 434, 640
Prugavin, Aleksandr S., 437n
Pryubel, Artur, 369n—370n
PSh (Suspicion of Espionage), 64, 284
Ptukhin, Yevgeny S., 80, 631
Pugachev, Yemelyan I., 433, 631
Punich, Ivan A., 73n
Pyankov, 281
Pyatakov, Georgi L., 354, 411, 415-16
PZ (Toadyism Toward the West), 91

Rachmaninoff, Sergei, 262
Radek, Karl B., 370n, 410, 415, 416,
631

Radishchev, Aleksandr N., 131, 500,
631
Rafailsky, 314
railroads, 28, 44—45, 493, 592-93
Chinese Eastern Railroad
(KVZhD), 72, 156, 217, 637
militarization of, 87, 439
Vikzhel (All-Russian Executive
Committee of Railroad Workers
Union), 28, 641
see also prisoner transport, railroad
cars
Rakovskaya, Yelena, 90
Ralov, R., 129
Ramzin, Leonid K., 377, 386-90
passim, 394, 396, 398-99, 401,
631
Ransome, Arthur, 13n, 631
Rappoport, Arnold, 279, 471-72
Raskolnikov (Ilin), Fyodor F., 467,
631
Rasputin, Grigory Y., 199, 322, 631
Ratner, Yevgeniya M., 364
Razin, Stepan T. (Stenka), 599, 631
Red Army see military forces
Red Cross see International Red Cross;
Political Red Cross
Reformatsky, Mikhail A., 443
Reilly, Sidney G., 127, 631
religious persecution and arrests, 51,
58, 59, 90, 475; see also Jews;
Moslems; Orthodox Church;
Roman Catholic Church
Repin, Ilya Y., 557, 631
Repina, 531
Reunov, Volodya, 580
Revolutionary Tribunals (Revtri-
bunals), 32, 282, 301-05, 308,
640; see also individual trials
Rimalis, 107
RKI (Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspec-
tion): Oldenborger trial, 336—41
passim
ROA see “Russian Liberation Army”
Rodionovites see Gil-Blazhevich
(Rodionov)
Roginsky, Grigory K., 399
Rokossovsky, Konstantin K., 252n,
448, 631
Roman Catholic Church: arrests and
persecution, 37
Romanov, Panteleimon S., 215, 632
Romanov, Vasily F., 420, 421
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 259n, 553-54,
611-12
Rossiya Insurance Company, 134,
210-11

655

Rostov-on-the-Don: House 33, 43,
103n, 104-05

Rottenberg, 314, 316, 318

Rozhansky, Dmitri A., 48, 49

Rozsas, Janos, 279

Rubin, Pyotr P., 465-66

Rudzutak, Yan E., 412, 632

Rumania, 384

World War II, 610

Rumanians: arrests, 86

Rumyantseva, Yuliya, 133

Rusov, 152, 421

Russell, Bertrand, 537n

“Russian Liberation Army” (ROA),
251, 253, 257

Russian Orthodox Church see
Orthodox Church

Russkaya Pravda, 132, 640

Russkiye Vedomosti: trial, 310-11

Ryabushinsky, Pavel P., 47, 632

Rybakova, Vera, 15

Rykov, Aleksei I., 335, 405, 410, 415,
416, 632

Ryleyev, Kondrati F., 131-32, 632

Rysakov, Nikolai I., 132, 632

Ryumin, M. D., 126, 127, 157-58,
182n, 297, 596, 632

Ryurik,.64, 232, 435, 632

Ryzhei, Pyotr L. see Tur Brothers

INDEX |

sabotage: and Criminal Code, 65, 67

Saburov, 421, 429, 430, 450

Sakharov, Igor K., 257n, 632

Saltychikha (Darya N. Saltykova),
211n, 437, 632

Samarin, A. D., 322, 324

Samsonov, Aleksandr V., 253n, 632

Samulyev, 110

Sandormirskaya, 41

Sanin, 508-09, 510, 511

Santerre, Max, 517

Sapropelite Committee, 95-96, 640

Saunin, 75

Savinkov, Boris V., 310, 357, 367-69,
369n-370n, 632

Savinkov, Lev B., 369, 371

Savva, St., 325, 632

Savvatyevsky Monastery Prison see
Solovetsky Islands

Sayenko, 156

Schlüsselburg Fortress, 41, 434n,
457-58, 462, 479, 480, 482, 640

schools and universities: arrests and
persecution, 26, 28, 31, 34, 38-39,
40, 43, 48, 59, 73, 90, 313, 357,
358, 416, 611

see also intelligentsia

656 |

Schrédinger, Erwin, 599
Schultz, 291n, 497
Schutzbiindlers, 59, 608, 640
scientists: arrests and persecution, 31,
73, 90, 95-96
see also intelligentsia
Sedelnikov, 336, 339, 340, 341
Sedin, Ivan K., 231, 632
Sedykh, Lyuba, 159
Selivanov, Dmitri F., 372, 632
Semyonov, 350
Semyonov, 362
Semyonov, Nikolai A., 248, 601
Senchenko, 152-53, 164
sentences, 284-86, 288-89, 291
in camp, 81, 248
death penalty (supreme measure),
60, 62, 63, 67, 243, 283, 291,
300, 302, 352-53, 432~55;
abolishment, 89, 302, 324, 434,
435-36, 439; appeals and com-
mutation, 446, 453; during Civil
War, 300, 435; (1937-38),
438-39; reinstatement, 89n,
290-91, 433, 434, 435, 436, 439;
during Tsarist regime, 301, 432-34
disenfranchisement (“muzzle”),
245, 248, 291
“minus,” 35, 271, 282
repeaters (second-termers), 25,
89-90
terms switched or sold, 560, 561
see also amnesty; Criminal Code
Serdyukova, 14
Serebryakova, Galina I., 540n, 632
Sergius, St., 326, 632
Sergius, Archimandrite, 352
Serov, Ivan A., 149n, 632
Seryegin, Viktor A., 293
“Seven-eighths” law, 58, 88, 436-37
Shakespeare, William, 173-74
Shakhty case: trial, 47, 336, 373-75,
376
Shalamov, Varlam T., 99n, 632
Kolyma Stories, xii, 632
Sketches of the Criminal World,
580n
Shanghai: Soviet émigrés, 264
sharashka see prisoners, special-
assignment work
Shchastny, Aleksei M., 306-07, 434,
435, 632
Shchebetin, 545
Shcherbakov, Aleksandr S., 157, 231,
632
Shein, 373
Sheinin, Lev R., 22, 633

INDEX

Shendrik, 555-56

Sheshkovsky, Stepan I., 131, 633

Shevtsov, Sergei P., 41

Shipovalnikov, Father Viktor, 127,
169, 576

Shitov, 150

Shkurkin, 154

Shmidt, Pyotr P., 614, 633

Sholokhov, Mikhail A., 244n, 633

Shpakov, Volodya, 580

Shpalernaya (prison; Moscow), 144,
459

Shtrobinder, Aleksandr, 443

Shubin, 425

Shulgin, Vasily V., 264-65, 633

Shvernik, Nikolai M., 399, 405-06,
633

“Siberian Peasants’ Union”: trial, 33

Sidorov, 116

Sikorski, Wladyslaw, 77

Sinebryukhov, 286

Sivakov, 98

Skobtsova, Yelizaveta Y. (Mother
Mariya), 188, 633

Skorokhvatov, 154

Skripnikova, Anna P., 8, 34n, 43, 98,
483, 500

Skrypnik, Nikolai A., 411, 633

Skuratov, Malyuta (Grigory L.
Belsky), 168, 633

Skyrius, Romualdas, 100

Slesarev, 292

Sliozberg (Adamova-Sliozberg), Olga,
xii, 294, 480

Smelov, Gennady, 473

SMERSH, 23, 640

Smirnov, 351

Smirnov, Fyodor I., 420, 421, 422,
427, 429, 430

Smirnov, Ivan N., 410, 411, 472, 633

Smushkevich, Yakov V., 80, 633

Social Democrats: arrests, 30, 36,
191, 460, 472, 474

Socialist Revolutionary Party, 191,
355-61 passim, 409, 640

arrests and trials, 29, 30, 31, 36, 41,

63, 302, 460, 463, 472, 474, 475;
amnesty (1919), 358-59, 360;
Central Committee, trial, 306—07,
342, 351-52, 354-67

socialists: arrests, 35—36, 39, 51, 59,
72, 469, 473-78, 500

SOE (Socially Dangerous Element),
86, 284

Sokol, 115

Sokolnikov, Grigory Y., 414-15, 633

Sokolov, 447

Solovetsky Islands (Solovki):
Special Purpose Camp (SLON;
Muskalmsky, Savvatyevsky,
Troitsky monastery prisons), 32,
37, 38, 43, 189, 463-65, 480, 640
Solovyev, 314, 316, 317, 318
Solovyev, Vladimir S., 37, 633
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I.: arrest and
imprisonment, 16-23, 66-67,
133-34, 153, 164-67, 250,
277-79; Butyrki, 237, 239,
241-42, 248, 252n, 260, 265,
267-68, 269, 271-80, 395, 594-
615; camp, 142, 589-90, 598, 601;
Krasnaya Presnya, 537-38,
546-49, 551-54, 557-58, 563-64;
Lubyanka, 134-42, 144, 184-235;
prisoner transport, 524-26,
530-32; special convoy, 588,
590-94 passim
The First Circle, 157, 590
and Khrushchev, 234n
military career, 19, 162-64, 169-70,
238-39, 255-57, 260, 594
One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich, 170, 175n, 298,
540n
Rostov University, 160, 161
Sorokin, 422
South Africa, Republic of, 290n
Spain: Civil War, 86, 263
Spanish Inquisition, 435n
Special Boards (OSO), 143, 275, 281,
283-86, 288, 289, 290, 295, 641
Special Purpose Prisons (TON), 457,
478-84
Special Purpose Detachments
(CHON), 303
spies see espionage
SR see Socialist Revolutionary Party
Sretenka (prison; Moscow), 568
Stakhanovite movement, 139
Stalin, Iosif V., 633
amnesty (1945) and rumors of, 78,
190n, 191n, 251, 271, 272, 273,
274, 278n, 280, 608
and Bukharin, 411-18 passim
Okhrana, possible service in, 67n,
195n
Order No. 227 (World War II), 81
and public trials, 47-48, 49-50
“Six Conditions,” 48 .
Stalingrad: World War II, 81, 162
State Bank, 401
State Commission for Famine Relief
(Pomgol), 34, 344, 345, 346, 347,
351, 638

INDEX | 657

State Planning Commission (Gosplan),
44, 63, 272, 392, 401

Stavrov, 420, 421, 426

Steiner, 258

Stelmakh, 98, 300

Stempkovsky, V. I., 330

Stepun, Fyodor A., 372, 634

Stolyarova, N., 131

Stolypin, Pyotr A., 301, 310, 389, 491,
634

Stolypin cars see prisoner transport,
railroad cars

stool pigeons, 128, 153, 185, 186,
448, 574, 618

Strakhovich, Konstantin I., 153, 289,
442, 444, 445, 446, 447

Strakhovich, Yelizaveta V., 153

Strik-Strikfeldt, Wilfred, 253n

Strutinskaya, Yelena, 109

Struzhinsky, 462, 503

students see schools and universities

Sudrabs, Yan F. see Latsis (Lacis),
Martyn I.

Sukhanov (Gimmer), NikolaiN., 49,634

Sukhanovka: prison, 113, 117, 126,
181-83, 479

Supreme Council of the Economy’
(VSNKh), 43—44, 63, 392, 401,
641

Supreme Soviet, 438, 641

Supreme Tribunal (Verkhtrib), 286,
295-98, 327, 366, 641; see also
individual trials

Surikov, Vasily I., 517, 567, 634

Surovets, Nadezhda V., 46

Surovtseva, Nadezhda, 477, 482

Susi, Arnold, 202, 205, 213, 214, 216,
225, 289, 493, 508

Suvorov, 596

Suzdal: prison, 478-79, 480

SVE (Socially Harmful Element), 284

Svechin, Aleksandr A., 443, 634

Sverdlov, Yakov M., 307, 634

SVPSh (Contacts Leading to
Suspicion of Espionage), 64, 284

Sweden, 272

World War II, Soviet internees, 83

“Tactical Center” case: trial, 327-33,
401

Taganka (prison; Moscow), 489

Tagantsev, Nikolai S., 433-34, 634

Taishet: camp, 513, 554, 560

Tanev, Vasil K., 247n

Tarakanov, 452

Tarle, Yevgeny V., 51, 634

Tatarin, Volodka, 580

658 |

Tatars, 25, 53, 59, 323
World War II, with Wehrmacht
units, 84, 253n, 638
Teitelbaum, Moisei I., 404
Tenno, Georgi, 279
Terekhov, D., 158-59, 172
thieves, 67, 78, 145, 478, 505-06,
618-19
and “beavers,” 507, 546
execution of (1937-38), 438
and polutsvetnye (“bitches” or
“halfbreeds”), 559, 580-81, 619
prisoner transport, 492, 498-99,
501-08 passim, 515-16, 529-30,
570-71, 572, 573, 575, 579-80
and “suckers,” 497-98, 505, 515,
571, 619
terms switched or sold, 560, 561
> transit prisons, 536, 537, 543-44,
546, 547-48, 549, 559n, 560, 561
as trusties, 536, 543-45
see also “Four-sixths” law;
“Seven-eighths” law
Tief, Otto, 214
Tikhon, Patriarch, 36, 326, 343-45,
634
“churchmen” trial, 322, 323
Moscow church trial, 346, 347, 348,
349
Time of Troubles, 342-43, 641
Timofeyev-Ressovsky, Nikolai V.,
149n, 207n, 493, 597, 598, 599,
600, 603, 604, 634
Tito, Iosip, 247n
TKP see Working Peasants Party
TN (Terrorist Intent), 65
Tolstoi, Alexandra L., 333, 634
Tolstoi, Lev (Leo) N., 147-48, 197,
223, 372, 434, 605, 613
Resurrection, 499, 583-84
Tolstoyans, 28, 51
Tomsky, Mikhail P., 411, 416, 634
TON see Special Purpose Prisons
trade unions, 13n, 26, 28, 339, 439
transit prisons and camps, 38, 489,
533-64
thieves, 536, 537, 543-44, 546,
547-48, 549, 559n, 560, 561
trusties, 536, 543-45, 559-60, 570
Travkin, Zakhar G., 19, 20
treason: and Criminal Code, 61, 79
see also prisoners of war
Tretyukin, Volodya, 580
Troitsky Monastery Prison see
Solovetsky Islands
Tronko, Igor, 268, 269

INDEX

Trotsky (Bronshtein), Lev (Leon) D.,
300n, 370n, 410, 434, 467, 634
Trotskyites, 284, 414, 415
arrests and persecution, 39, 52, 90,
284, 472, 476, 477
Trubetskoi, Sergei P., 132, 634
Trushin, 491
Trutnev, 154
Tsarapkin, Sergei R., 597, 600, 604-05
“Tsarist Reds,” 39
Tsarist regime: laws and judiciary,
281, 287, 301, 432-34
Okhrana, 67, 195, 639
prisons and camps, 35, 132, 189,
409, 457-58, 466, 467, 495n,
499-500
Tseitlin, Yefim, 413n
Tsvetayeva, Marina I., 188, 635
Tsvetkov, 322, 324
Tsvilko, Adolf, 146
Tubelsky, Leonid D. see Tur Brothers
Tukhachevsky, Mikhail N., 33n, 634
Tur Brothers (Pyotr L. Ryzhei and
Leonid D. Tubelsky), 22, 635
Tvardovsky, 479
Tynyanov, Yuri N., 613, 635

Ukrainians: arrests, 62, 77, 91, 99-100
“Banderovtsy,” 86, 91, 519, 622
Union for Liberation of the

Ukraine, trial, 51
World War II, with Wehrmacht
units, 253n, 262n
Ulrikh, Vasily V., 289-90, 296, 368,
369, 635

Ulyanov, Aleksandr I., 14, 41, 134,
635

Union for Liberation of the Ukraine:
trial, 51

“Union of Rebirth,” 357, 401

United States, 86, 90, 91, 101n,
World War II: repatriation of

Soviets, 82n, 85, 249, 259-60;
Yalta Conference, 185, 259

Univer, 421, 422, 426, 430, 431

Uritsky, Moisei S., 174, 314, 635

urki see thieves

Uspenskaya, 315-16, 320, 321-22

Uspensky, 322

Ust-Vym: camp, 243, 540, 584

Utyosov, Leonid Q.,.534, 635

VAD (Praise of American De-
mocracy), 91

Valentin, 274, 279, 280, 546-47, 548

Valentinov (Volsky), Nikolai V.,
466, 635

Vaneyev, 133

Varentsov, Ivan N., 43

VAS (Dissemination of Anti-Soviet
Sentiments), 284

Vasilyev, 150n

Vasilyev-Yuzhin, Mikhail I., 282,
373n, 635

VAT (Praise of American Tech-
nology), 91

Vavilov, Nikolai I., 50, 445-46, 635

disciples arrested, 90

VChK see Cheka

Velichko, A. F., 44, 375

Veniamin, Metropolitan, 36, 345, 346,
349-50, 367

Petrograd church trial, 36, 350-52,

458n

Vereshchagin, Vasily V., 211n, 635

Verkhne-Uralsk: prison, 271n, 465,
466, 475, 479

Verkhtrib see Supreme Tribunal

vertukhai, 203

Vikzhel (All-Russian Executive
Committee of Railroad Workers
Union), 28, 641

Vinogradsky, N. N., 330

Vitkovsky, Dmitri P., xi, xii, 98, 242n

Vladimir: prison, 125n, 475, 479-83
passim

Vladimirescu, 608-10

Vlasov, Andrei A., 251-53, 257n, 258,
635; see also Vlasov men

Vlasov, Vasily G., 14, 152, 421-31
passim, 449-55 passim, 557

Vlasova, Zoya, 431n

Vlasov men, 85, 223, 243, 246, 251,
253n, 255-63 passim; see also
Vlasov, Andrei A.

Vogt, 599-600

Voikov, Pyotr L., 41-42, 635

VOKhR (Militarized Guard Service),
157, 249

Volga Canal, project, 59, 285

Volkonskaya, Zinaida, 182

Volkopyalov, 1497, 154

Vologda: prison, 513, 534, 542, 569

Voloshin, Maksimilian A., 34, 635

Vorkuta: camp and projects, 82n-83n,
577, 578

Vorobyev, I. Y., 155

Vorobyev, N. M., 10

Voroshilov, Kliment Y., 124n, 454,
636

Voskoboinikov, K. P., 254n, 257n

Vostrikov, Andrei I., 5—6

VSNKh see Supreme Council of the
Economy

INDEX | 659

VTsIK see All-Russian Central
Executive Committee

Vul, 282

Vyazemskaya, Princess, 40

Vysheslavtsev, Boris P., 372, 636

Vyshinsky, Andrei Y., xii, 34, 62,
100-01, 139, 271n, 282-83,
288n—289n, 358, 373, 376, 377,
378, 384, 418, 459n, 553, 636

Vyushkov, 163-64

Warsaw: World War II, 257n
Waschkau, Günther, 291n
White Russians see Civil War, émigrés
White Sea Canal, project, xii, 42, 157
Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection
see RKI
Working Peasants Party (TKP), 386,
387
trial, 49-50, 57, 331, 400
World War I, 31, 219n, 242, 253n,
272, 343, 356-57
World War II, 63, 77, 81, 240,
252n—253n, 259n—260n
anti-Soviet fighting forces with
Wehrmacht, 253n—254n, 254-55,
257n, 258, 260, 262n; émigrés,
254n, 257n; Estonians, Lithuanians,
and Ukrainians, 253n, 262n;
“Hiwi,” 246, 638; Krasnov and
Krasnov Cossacks, 85, 246, 254n,
259, 262n, 263, 627; Moslems,
87, 257n, 262n; prisoners of war
as spies, 220, 221-22, 246-47,
247-48, 260, 261; Rodionovites,
254n, 257n; “Russian Liberation
Army” (ROA), 251, 253, 257;
Tatars, 84, 253n, 638; Vlasov and
Vlasov men, 85, 223, 243, 246,
251-53, 255-63 passim, 635
arrests, 24—25, 60, 61, 78-86, 238,
270-71, 441, 507, 566, 579, 602;
émigrés, 63, 84-85, 238, 262-66
passim, 566, 602; military, 79, 80,
81, 110, 238; military—prisoners
of war, 25, 81, 82-83, 142, 164,
221n, 237-51 passim, 255-56,
259-60, 260-61, 602
criminals released for service, 81
deserters, 250-51
ending of, 235-36, 270-71
internees in Sweden, 83
repatriation of Soviets by Allies,
82n, 85, 249, 259-60
Resistance and partisans, 82,
244—45, 257n, 261, 263

660 |

World War II (cont'd)
war criminals, 84, 175, 176-77
Yalta Conference, 185, 259
see also prisoners of war (World
War II); individual countries
Wrangel, Pyotr N., 137, 436, 636

INDEX

Yagoda, Genrikh G., 34, 96, 157, 173,
314, 374, 375, 410-11, 415, 438,
465, 636

Yakubovich, 402n .

Yakubovich, Mikhail P., 49, 370, 400,
401-07, 418

Yakubovich, Pyotr F., 636

In the World of Outcasts, 495n,
499, 500n, 561n, 577

Yakulov, 312, 316

Yakuts, 51

Yalta Conference, 185, 259

Yaroshenko, Nikolai A., 491, 636

Yaroslavl: prison, 469, 473, 477, 478,
480

Yasevich, Konstantin K., 267-68, 602

Yefimov, 362

Yefremov, Sergei A., 51

Yegorov, 350

Yegorov, P. V., 310-11

Yenukidze, Avel S., 412, 636

Yermilov, Vladimir V., 525, 636

Yesenin, Sergei A., 604, 636

Yezepov, I. I., 134, 135, 142, 144

Yezhov, Nikolai I., 76, 157, 427n,
438, 479, 636

Yudenich, Nadezhda, 74

Yudenich, Nikolai N., 213, 332, 636

Yugoslavia: World War II, 85, 219

Yurovsky, L. N., 50

Yuzhakov, 74

Zabolovsky, 71

Zalygin, Sergei P., 56n, 636

Zamyatin, Yevgeny I., 46, 215, 636

Zaozerov, 425

Zaozersky, A. N., 347

Zapadny, 469

Zasulich, Vera I., 281, 287, 636

Zavalishin, Dmitri I., 132, 636

zeks see prisoners

Zeldovich, Vladimir B., 483

Zelensky, 132

Zenyuk, 338

Zhdanov, Andrei A., 157, 441, 447,
636

Zhebrak, Anton R., 599, 636

Zheleznov, Foma F., 137

Zhelyabov, Andrei I., 287, 636

Zhilenkov, G. N., 253n

Zhukov, Georgi K., 252n, 636

Zinoviev (Apfelbaum), Grigory Y.,
299, 300n, 397, 410, 411, 412,
413, 636

Zverev, G. A., 258n

HB5D